shenfield
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Even granting that UBI would tend to depress wage levels, it would also provide basic security to the unemployed and people with precarious employment. This would make more of a difference in the US than in the UK because unemployment benefit in the US is conditional on the circumstances in which you lose a job and lasts only a limited time (often only 6 months, never more than 2 years). Our attitude toward it should not be wholly negative or dismissive.
We often argue that administration of the money system wastes an enormous amount of labor that would be freed in socialism for useful work. But the amount of labor required to administer a voucher system would be of comparable magnitude.
Actual labor time in socialism would exceed socially necessary labor time for several reasons. They would be equal only if the organizers of the labor process aimed to minimize actual labor time and succeeded in doing so. Even if they tried they could never succeed as that would require elimination of all error. Planning of production requires projections of the future and such projections will never be completely reliable. For instance, account must be taken of loss of crops due to bad weather. Planning could compensate for this by allowing for reserves, but in that case actual labor time is likely to exceed what turns out to be socially necessary labor time. However, I do not think that a socialist society will even try to minimize labor time. To make work more pleasant and healthier the pace will be reduced and jobs will be rotated at frequent intervals to reduce the mental and physical harm of repetitive body motions, even though that will increase labor time. Greater reliance may also be placed on forms of work that increase labor time but are more enjoyable and satisfying, like handicraft production.
The capitalists and their political representatives have great difficulty acting in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, i.e. the capitalist system as such. This is due to the divisions within the capitalist class and also their short time-horizon. Even at the national level it tends to be shifting alliances of special capitalist interests that determine policy. This is especially true of the US due to the weakness of institutions that in other countries try to act in the interests of national capital as a whole (e.g., the absence of a permanent corps of administrators and policy advisers within the civil service, such as exists in the UK or France). Only under enormous pressure from below is it possible for the political system to throw up a figure who like FDR can represent the objective interests of the capitalist class as a whole (the subjective view of most US capitalists was that he was a traitor to his class). The danger is that action on climate change will be a case of too little too late. Yes, when disaster is almost upon us a sufficient number of big capitalists may finally realize that they have to “do something.” The “something” will have to be vast geo-engineering projects because accelerated transition to renewable energy will no longer suffice. But that will need a long lead-in time to develop methods, build necessary infrastructure etc. If they started working on it now there may still be enough time left, but they may decide to act only when the time needed is no longer available. There is also the likelihood that geo-engineering undertaken without adequate knowledge and preparation will go wrong and not work as intended, perhaps mitigating certain effects but exacerbating others.
We can’t judge the risk of extinction on the basis of forecasts of so many degrees of warming by this or that date (2050, 2100 etc.) because the process does not end at any specific date. It goes on and on. The big danger is not CO2 but methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and lies in waiting in frozen form in enormous quantity in seabeds. Plenty of methane is already escaping from melting permafrost and shallow Arctic seas. There is no reason why earth should not end up resembling Venus and humans could not survive on Venus.
Finally, it is likely that global warming will continue to increase the danger of war, including nuclear war, due to heightened conflict over arable land and other shrinking resources. And nuclear war could also easily lead to extinction of our species due to ‘nuclear winter’ — so we may perish as a result of either unbearable heat or unbearable cold.
