With attacks on industry, healthcare and education intensifying, JAMSHID AHMADI warns of a deliberate drive to cripple Iran and calls for urgent global action
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After AI: time to embrace universal basic income?
As AI advances, the case for universal basic income gains traction, challenging traditional notions of labour organising while offering a viable solution to the decline in the need for work and workers, argues BERT SCHOUWENBURG
[Igor Omilaev / Creative Commons]
Argentinians commemorated the 50th anniversary of the military dictatorship that left 30,000 people killed or ‘disappeared.’ BERT SCHOUWENBURG reports
In Voices of Scotland YANA PETTICREW looks at the crippling deterioration of working-class art provision and support
As weapons return to Suffolk and defence spending soars, London CND is pressing local candidates to oppose nuclear expansion and support the UN ban treaty. SALLY SPIERS explains
One hundred years on from Britain’s only general strike, socialists will gather in London at the Morning Star’s annual conference to discuss how organised labour can once again become the engine of radical change. Editor BEN CHACKO encourages readers to come along and join the debate
In the year following Peterloo a mass strike erupted into armed revolt as Scotland’s workers demanded their rights, yet this uprising remains largely absent from popular history, writes KENNY MacASKILL
THE explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and the concurrent loss of paid employment for millions of people has reenergised the debate about the future of work and given fresh impetus to the advocates of a universal basic income (UBI), a concept that is viewed with some suspicion and scepticism by many on the left.
UBI is a social welfare measure in which all citizens of a given population receive a guaranteed minimum income in the form of a regular unconditional transfer payment. The principal arguments of its critics are that it creates welfare dependency and is simply unaffordable, neither of which stands up to scrutiny.
Since the 1773 Inclosure Act started a process that saw hundreds of thousands of people displaced from the land and forced to work in the towns and cities, where the Industrial Revolution was born, society has placed a high value on a Puritan work ethic which values productivity and hard graft and frowns upon the slackers and the workshy who do not buy into it.
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