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Title: Basic Income & Billionaire preppers
Author: Andrew Flood
Date: March 30, 2017
Language: en
Topics: universal basic income, preparation, crisis, Capitalism
Source: Retrieved on 13th August 2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/article/30127

Andrew Flood

Basic Income & Billionaire preppers

Our global society is broken. Donald Trump & Brexit are symptoms along

with the rise of the far right elsewhere in Europe. In an old pattern,

fundamental economic crisis often results in society becoming very much

more brutal for most people. In the age of nuclear weapons this current

crisis could be our last. And with a somewhat longer countdown to

disaster we are also facing climate catastrophe.

The crisis is fundamental rather than temporary because there are two

underlying factors that are irreversible. The first is the end of the

era where the environmental costs of growth could be mostly discounted

in the belief that dilution would neutralise pollution. For much of the

industrial revolution the poisonous effluent dumped into the ecosystem

had only local severe effects with the vast oceans and atmosphere

diluting the pollutants enough that global effects were minor. This is

no longer the case with climate change being the most talked about of

several examples where the pollution generated by growth can no longer

be absorbed without serious global consequences.

Capitalism depends on constant growth and constant growth generates

pollution. The stock market boom following Trump taking power is a

direct effect of him tearing up environmental protection legislation,

profits will increase because business will have to cover less of the

environmental cost. Our children will pay the bill for this short lived

boom for shareholders.

The Abolition of Work, or Employment?

The second fundamental aspect is automation. For much of human history

the amount that could be produced was very closely related to human

effort. In a given set of conditions the only way to produce more was to

spend more human hours in production. At times of empire building this

drove incredible cruelty as expansion was dependent on conquest, robbery

and enslavement of populations who were then worked so hard that their

death rate greatly exceeded the reproduction rate.

The wealth that the European powers built the industrial revolution on

was generated in precisely this way, resulting in the deaths of hundreds

of millions of people around the planet as overwork and underfeeding

left them vulnerable to disease and starvation. But the industrial

revolution also changed what had been a simple relationship between the

amount produced and the amount of human labour required. New machines

started to allow a single worker to do the work that once would have

required 5, 10, 50 or 100. This process was not independent of the

environmental problem above but rather a cause of it as fossil fuels

provided almost all of the replacement muscle that drove the machines.

In today’s networked age we are seeing a change that will have a bigger

impact than the industrial revolution on human society. As machines have

become smarter the need to have a worker guiding their actions has

shrunk and shrunk. We have reached the stage where very complex

operations like driving a car on a busy road — that humans can only

legally do after a period of intense study — can now be done far better

by computers. It will take a while for production and the legal system

to catch up but essentially we are already at the point where taxi

drivers, bus drivers and lorry drivers are hanging on to those jobs by

their fingernails. Retail stores including fast food restaurants are

replacing check out workers with machines. Banks and insurance companies

are removing the ability of customers to call into branches or talk to a

humans on the phone, again people being replaced by machines.

Trump & Brexit were driven by the false idea that it was migrants who

were ‘taking jobs.’ Actually it is robots and realistically as smart

automation escalates there are very few jobs that will not be replaced.

A tiny number of new jobs will be created but the low and unskilled

workers most affected by automation are locked out of those jobs by lack

of access to education.

Resisting the Machines?

In the early period of the industrial revolution we saw a very, very

much weaker version of this as textile workers found that a machine like

the ‘Spinning Jenny’ allowed a single relatively low paid unskilled

worker to replace dozens of skilled spinners. They resisted, with some

initial success. There are several lessons from that period.

Perhaps most importantly is that although the replacement workers

operating the Spinning Jenny replaced dozens they were considerably

worse off than any worker they replaced. The combination of deskilling

and lack of ownership by the worker of the machines that produced

allowed the extreme ruthlessness of early capitalism that saw children

working 12 hour days for pennies in extremely unhealthy conditions that

killed many of them. The capitalist got rich, the replacement worker was

poorer than any of the 10 or 20 they replaced. In fact that’s how the

capitalist got rich, suddenly they had the same amount of goods from the

labour of one worker that they previously had to pay 20 for.

Secondly skilled workers were aware of exactly what was happening and

not only managed to organise against this but put up a really strong

fight. Under the brutal dictatorship that existed at the time that

executed and transported those that resisted they had to be very

secretive. This means we don’t know the fine detail of how they

organised that resistance. But we do know that well organised, armed and

large groups of workers who we know as the ‘luddites’ mobilised over

relatively long periods of time to rise up and smash the machines. And

that it took the deployment of considerable military force over a period

of years to put them down.

This happened in Britain during the Napoleonic wars. Historian Eric

Hobsbawm has pointed out that although that war was a life and death

struggle for the British ruling class at one point they had more troops

deployed putting down the luddites than fighting Napoleon. The luddite

movement smashed thousands of machines and was successful in slowing

down the rate at which their wages and conditions were destroyed but

over a couple of decades the employers imposed the new machines and with

them the new and brutal working conditions and low wages.

Machines replaced some skilled workers in Britain bit by bit over

decades,the luddite resistance of the 1810’s was followed 20 years later

by the Captain Swing riots against the introduction of agricultural

threshing machines. Todays automation is affecting a very, very much

larger percentage of the planet’s population over a very much shorter

span of time. Left to ‘market forces’ and state repression we can expect

something very much more severe but also involving far more people.

The Crisis is Already with Us

There is in fact a strong argument this is already in progress, the Arab

spring of 2011, Occupy and other moments of resistance are driven in

part by mass youth unemployment. Occupy is a well documented response to

the capitalist crisis, in the case of the Arab Spring Cairo based

Dorothea Schmidt of the International Labour Organization looked at the

forces “that brought these mostly young people onto the streets. An

extremely high youth unemployment rate of 23.4 per cent in 2010, is one

major but not the only cause for these popular uprisings” Rising food

prices related to the impact of climate change on production was also

key in the Arab spring. The uprisings that started the revolution in

Algeria and Tunisia were directly caused by rising food prices and riots

in response, elsewhere they were an often mentioned backdrop.

Drought, in part from climate change, was a significant factor in the

forces leading to the Syrian revolution and extremely brutal Civil War

that still rages on. Satellite measurements show that the

Tigris-Euphrates basin is losing groundwater at a faster rate than

anywhere else in the world, except Northern India, due to poor rainfall

and over extraction in particular by Turkey which has reduced water flow

to Iraq by 80% and Syria by 40%.

From 2006 the drought in Syria was causing tens of thousands of farmers

to abandon their land and move to the cities, adding to youth

unemployment. One academic study concluded that this water crisis in

Syria “contributed to the displacement of large populations from rural

to urban centers, food insecurity for more than a million people, and

increased unemployment—with subsequent effects on political stability. ”

This causal factor has also been mentioned in studies of activists from

the region. In Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War the

authors say “The situation was made worse by the severe drought plaguing

much of the country since 2006. Rural areas such as the Jazeera (in the

east) and the Hawran (in the south) were particularly hard-hit. By 2010

the drought had pushed between two and three million Syrians into

extreme poverty, destroying the livelihoods of around 800,000 farmers

and herders”. The also noted other familiar causes “neo-liberal reforms

were accompanied by the dismantling – by cutting subsidies – of the

economic safety net for the poor. Inequality grew, until 50 per cent of

the country’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of 5 per cent of the

population. High unemployment, underemployment and low wages made it

harder and harder to make ends meet. In 2004, just over 30 per cent of

the population (5.3 million people) lived in poverty, rising to 62 per

cent in rural areas … Youth unemployment stood at a staggering 48 per

cent, with young women four times more likely to be unemployed than

young men”

Revolution in Rojava, which often takes a sharply different perspective

on the Syrian conflict to Burning Country, also talks about the same

causal factors pointing out that “In 2012–13, long-predicted water

shortages became a reality” and points to the difficulty supplying water

now presents to the revolution. “Wheat and cotton are Serekaniye’s main

crops. Water for irrigation must be pumped from 200–500 meters below the

surface, and the pumps need to be powered by electricity, which has been

cut off”

The World Has Changed

When you are in world changing historic events it’s often hard to see

that is the case. Instead things appear disconnected and driven by

individuals, group and ideology. Taking a step back for a moment and we

begin to see how climate change and unemployment although driven from

Silicon valley, the Ruhr and Shanghai has first disrupted regions which

are comparatively economically marginal like Syria, Egypt and Iraq. We

can see how the tumult that has spread out from there has then precisely

shaped conditions in Silicon valley and the Ruhr as ‘refugee panic’

politics started to shape domestic politics. True the automation that is

most visible in those regions is the automatic mass killing of the

helicopter gunship and the remotely operated or autonomous drone, again

linking us back to the US. The political shocks are not separate but

part of the same crisis and can only get much worse as the crisis

escalates.

There is no going back. We can delay things by smashing the machines as

the taxi drivers of Paris have fought Uber. The experience of the

Luddites (and indeed of print workers and dockers last century) tell us

such a fight is not futile. In the short term it can protect wages and

conditions, allowing that generation to raise their children in relative

comfort but those children don’t inherit those well paid jobs.

History tells us that the market driven quest for profit will create

replacement machines and will station soldiers to guard them. And today

we are at the edge of that moment when those soldiers will no longer be

humans whom we can call on to revolt but will be machines themselves.

The forces the US has deployed over much of the planet still require

infantry but most of the ongoing killing is already being carried out by

human-machine hybrids that were science fiction two decades ago.

Wealth Gap

There is a third factor worth mentioning, this one isn’t irreversible or

new but rather a pattern of history. Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the

21^(st) Century’ may have been too technical to be completed by many of

its readers but it provided a clear illustration that the wealth gap was

rapidly increasing. And more importantly a warning that at a certain

point the effects of that gap on society made it almost impossible to

reverse without major warfare.

One measure of the escalating wealth gap is how many of the super rich

hold the same wealth as the poorest half of the planet’s population. A

decade back you could fit them in a big jet plane like a 737, there were

about 350 of them. A few years back that number had shrunk to about 50,

a coach-load. A couple of years ago it had shrunk to a small bus-load.

The latest Oxfam figure is that it is now a single car load, if you cram

the 8 of them into a SUV. Half of American adults have seen no increase

in real wealth since 1980, for the top 1% wealth tripled in the same

period and the increase was much greater for the top 0.1 and 0.01%.

There are already examples in Mexico and Johannesburg and elsewhere of

what happens when the incredibly rich and the incredibly poor are

crammed into the same urban landscapes. It’s an urban landscape of

mansions surrounded by high walls, razor wire, CCTV cameras, attack dogs

and ‘shoot to kill’ security. Those inside live in constant fear of

those starving outside and as a consequence increasingly brutal regimes

of repression and murder become normalised.

The Corporate Tech Overlords

Apple is now the largest corporation on the planet, a corporation whose

business model is built on removing elements of choice and control from

their users in the belief that the CEOs know best. For an increasing

number of us, access to news and communications is overwhelming filtered

through Facebook algorithms. In the last decades a psychological science

of manipulation has developed where the goal has been to influence our

unconscious minds against both rational thought and better instinct.

Trump’s idiotic neuro-linguistic programming where everything is

fantastic, bad or fakenews seems to have been enough to reach into the

fear centres of a sizeable minority of the population. The Economist

reported that the best single predictor for a Trump voter was poor

health, indeed what other than sickness makes us vulnerable to hucksters

preying on our fears? Increasing insecurity in the workplace and

subjecting welfare payments to various tests adds to creating a constant

situation of stress in many people’s lives that makes them vulnerable to

the politics of fear and scapegoating.

The tech elite form a tiny, tiny percentage of the world’s population

but now hold in their hands an enormous percentage of the world’s

wealth. The 8 people who own as much wealth as half the world include

Bill Gates (1), Carlos Slim (4), Jeff Bezos(5), Mark Zuckerberg (6) and

Larry Ellison (7). Those five are all rich from the technological

revolution of the last decades.

Gates, the richest of them, has become a sort of benevolent dictator.

Having made an enormous fortune he is now claims to be distributing that

pile to those he considers to be the most deserving poor. This has made

him personally responsible for the life and death of millions of people

on the planet, in particular the children he has chosen to save though

funding inoculation programs. The stated goal is to prevent 11 million

deaths by 2020.

We can be grateful with regard to Bill that a lucky dice roll meant that

this Pharaoh has chosen a benevolent old age — no doubt with an eye to

how he is remembered — but history is littered with examples of the rich

and powerful who were not. How long do we want to gamble on that dice

roll. Larry Ellison for instance spent 130 million on his latest super

yacht and 500 million on buying the island of Lanai.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was named the world’s worst boss by the

International Trade Union Confederation in 2014 as representing the

“inhumanity of employers who are promoting the American corporate model”

There have been several exposés of the terrible conditions of poorly

paid Amazon warehouse workers, one reminder of the costs of automation,

but as a New York Times article showed conditions for White Collar

workers are also terrible in Amazon’s ‘race to the bottom’

A lot of scientists are aware of these crisis. Stephen Hawking for

instance has warned several times of the consequences of automation and

the futures which lie before us. But is there a way out? Are we doomed?

Our methods of political discussion and decision making remain trapped

in technologies that are hundreds of years old because the limits that

imposes suits those who have wealth and power. That is illustrated by

the complete ease with which complex cross border financial transactions

can be instantly completed. Yet the parliamentary system alongside them

is still at the equivalent point as when those transactions involved

meetings in particular dockside coffee shops to decide how the risk

would be divided on ship voyages that would take two years to return.

The parliamentary system remains as is because a process that involves

the selection of a few to represent the views of millions without being

subject to mandate or recall is a system where those few can be bought.

[Read more]

There are Three Futures.

The first future is the default one, what happens if we do nothing and

just allow the invisible hand of the market to rule. It’s the process of

the last 40 years, unleashed by the neoliberal bloodletting that started

literally with the dictator Pinochet in Chile and developed under Reagan

and Thatcher. Under this future the wealth gap becomes even more

extreme, the powerful become even more fearful of the rest of us and we

increasingly fight each other for the reduced resources that are allowed

to trickle down to the jobless majority. At best we hope for benevolent

pharaohs like Gates rather than self obsessed ones like Bezos or

Zuckerberg so that we are at least allowed to survive rather than starve

or die in the resource civil wars. But perhaps there is no hope at all

if the worst climate change models play out and a positive feedback loop

results in run-away warming.

Second Future

The second is the one that an increasing number of the elite are turning

to because they also aren’t that keen about the world of fear and

helicopter gunships that also lies in their future. Economist Mark Blyth

has a nice line on this that “the Hamptons are not a defensible

position”. The Hamptons being the super rich zone on the beaches above

New York where billionaire New Yorkers have their weekend mansions.

Perhaps in recognition of the indefensible nature of this strip of land

an hour from the millions in New York it has recently emerged that

several tech billionaires have bought large landholdings in New Zealand

where they are building luxury bunkers. New Zealand being sparsely

populated and a long way from anywhere else being judged to be the

safest available bolt hole if the shit really hits the fan as a result

of the future they are building.

The New Yorker published a long read on these super wealthy ‘preppers’

in which they quote LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman. What he had to

say deserves a lengthy extract he “recalls telling a friend that he was

thinking of visiting New Zealand.

“Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?” the friend asked.

“I’m, like, Huh?” Hoffman told me.

New Zealand, he discovered, is a favored refuge in the event of a

cataclysm. Hoffman said, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’

is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic

handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells

old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like

they would be interesting to live in.’ ”

Hoffman then estimates half of his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires

have acquired some sort of “apocalypse insurance,” hideaway in the U.S.

or abroad saying “The fears vary, but many worry that, as artificial

intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a

backlash against Silicon Valley”. “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of

people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the

wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it

going to turn into civil disorder?”

It would be a pretty miserable world to live in even if you were one of

the wealthy few gazing out at the chaos from behind electric fences.

Evan Osnos, the author of the New Yorker piece, visited the Survival

Condo Project, a fifteen-story luxury apartment complex built in an

underground nuclear missile silo in Kansas and was told ““It’s true

relaxation for the ultra-wealthy,” he said. “They can come out here,

they know there are armed guards outside. The kids can run around.” The

apartments, all of which have been sold, cost 3 million dollars for a

full one and come with the assurance that in a crisis you will be picked

up anywhere within 400 miles by an armoured truck to be brought to the

silo. The truck has a heavy machine gun mounted on it just in case the

mob gets in the way. There are also armed guards and a sniper tower

protecting the compound although the view from deep underground has to

be provided by LED screens acting as windows that show a live view of

the Prairie above or if the owner prefers a pine forest or even a busy

New York street scene!

That gun-toting fear ridden underground existence sounds a little bit

miserable, something many of the super rich recognise. And how certainly

safe is flight anyway? The same New Yorker piece talked to a ex

investment banker Robert H. Dugger who reported on a dinner party

conversation of one such group of billionaire preppers where on hearing

of plans to fly to safety in the event of a mass rebellion a guest asked

‘Are you taking your pilot’s family, too? And what about the maintenance

guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors, how many of the people in

your life will you have to take with you?’ The questioning continued. In

the end, most agreed they couldn’t run.”

Finally the super rich also have to again consider that Climate Change

is such a global threat that sooner or later it might even get them and

their descendants. Of course the poor will die in their droves first,

indeed they already are, but there is a danger of hitting a positive

feedback tipping point where the Earth ends up like Venus, so hot no one

survives.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that a section of the super wealthy elite

favour reducing the problem created by the escalating wealth divide, as

Dugger says “It’s a reason most of them give money to good causes”. This

future is the warehousing strategy of introducing a Universal Basic

Income (UBI) for those lucky enough to be born in the already

industrialised zones where most of the super rich live. When the need

for our labour ends rather than leaving us to starve (and perhaps rob

them if not revolt) the elite want to give us enough of an income to

survive on. UBI would involve every citizen or resident (and that

distinction is important) being given a regular unconditional sum of

money in addition to any income received from elsewhere. In most forms

of UBI this is enough money to look after essential needs including

housing and healthcare.

This warehousing may appear more attractive to some of us but it also

moves us inside the borders of fear. It inevitably involves escalating

the slamming of the door on those trapped outside because of where they

happened to be born. Thousands of people have died trying to cross the

EU borders this year without the magic of the right passport. Even as I

type this I’ve received a new notification that dozens of bodies of the

drowned have just been found along the coast of Libya, another ship must

have gone down.

UBI would also do little against the other looming disasters related to

growth and pollution, in particular climate change. It would have some

impact as the super wealthy would be slightly less powerful so

environmental protection laws would be stronger but capitalism and its

need for incessant growth would survive and continue to deepen that

crisis. UBI has also become a cover in many countries for the final

abolition of the welfare state as parties say they will fund it by

abolishing entitlement to services which people will then have to buy.

In countries like Ireland where a welfare system exists mainstream

parties have started to talk about UBI as a way of eliminating

bureaucracy and introducing market competition. In practise that

translated into eliminating yet more jobs — in the public sector — and

replacing only some of them with what would be much more insecure

private sector jobs. UBI was even favourably put forward — as ‘negative

taxation’ — by Milton Friedman, the chief economist promoting

neoliberalism who also advised Pinochet on the post-coup destruction of

workers’ gains in Chile.

Third Future

The third future requires a leap in social organisation that is at least

as big as the leap that was made between the absolute monarchies of the

1600s and the republican democracies that spread from the 1780s. That is

at a planet wide level we abolish inequality of access to resources and

inequality of power. There will no longer be some people who own super

yachts and entire islands while others watch their children die of

starvation. The full environmental costs of growth will have to be

factored into every new development because we will no longer havr a

system where some can use their wealth to evade the consequences while

others are forced to live in the filth generated.

That future has been glimpsed as long as humans have been around.

Arguably we spent our first couple of hundred thousand years in

something quite like it. Gather Hunter societies didn’t have a surplus

that could be hoarded and that lack of wealth meant there wasn’t much

opportunity for power. Biology placed limitations that today we can

escape, for instance child birth often killed women, but in many

respects they were quite equal societies.

It was only with the creation of agriculture that large surpluses of

food could be produced and hoarded. And that meant that humans could

fight each other to get control of the hoard, and perhaps quite quickly

that translated into those with control paying a segment of the stronger

and more violent section of the population to keep the rest in check. We

spent the last 10,000 years developing that system to the absolute

monarchies and it’s only in the last 200 years we have begun to limit

the power of the hoarders through politics. The danger is that military

automation means they are about to escape those limitations we imposed

through mass organisation.

That third future is now more possible than ever before. We can produce

enough to ensure all our needs, globally, are fulfilled and automation

rather than being a threat can mean that we can end work. From the

agricultural revolution on most of us have had to work long hours for

the hoarders to survive and perhaps had little control over that work.

Automation could mean that the hard graft of paid work vanishes to be

replaced by work for pleasure. The difference between back breaking work

in a field 10 hours a day harvesting potatoes and spending a few hours a

week pottering around in your garden.

Discussion and decision making have also become vastly simpler. Only 40

years ago there was no way for masses of people to communicate with each

other over distances. Discussion was one-to-many only, via radio and TV

or in print media. Today a vast host of online tools allow such many to

many discussions. Issue based voting has also become very much simpler,

even if its major use now is click bait polling by online news sites.

And electronic tallying means that complex polling is now very

straightforward, there is no need to limit decisions to simple yes/no

choices when the full range of options can be polled and counted

instantaneously.

The third future is one without the division into order giver and order

taker or the related one into rich and poor. These would not simply be

huge economic and political transformation, the effect of them would

also would transform in a very deep way what it means to be human. Our

interactions would no longer be governed by fear and power, our

potential to live fully would be released. The mental and physical

labour we performed would be to enrich all those around us rather than a

question of performing repetitive tasks because that alienation from our

own labour is the only way of keeping a roof above our heads.

We are so close that we can almost reach out and touch the world which

earlier people could only imagine. But the window of opportunity to

bring it into being may be short, indeed for the reasons outlined above

it is already closing, We know from history how we can win: through

collective organisation. And today that is easier to do than ever before

in many respects, in particular the access almost all of us have to

global mass communication. The question is are you willing to take the

step and start organising with others to make this dream the future we

will step into