>>13638One-paragraph Marxist summary (AI)Cockshott argues that UBI is best understood not as an emancipatory guarantee of livelihood, but as a mechanism for reducing the cost of labour-power to capital. By paying workers a universal sum that can be combined with very low wages, UBI allows employers to pay below the normal reproduction cost of labour while the state socialises the difference. Historically, this connects to Friedman/Hayek negative income tax and to New Labour tax credits: both subsidised low-wage employers. His critique of the "robots are taking our jobs" case is that the real problem under neoliberalism is not excessive automation but wage suppression discouraging productivity-enhancing investment. A livable UBI would require such heavy taxation of ordinary earners that it becomes a circular redistribution harming pensioners, average workers, and two-earner households; an affordable UBI would be too small to live on and would simply become another employer subsidy. Thus, from a Marxist perspective, UBI preserves the wage relation, weakens labour's bargaining position, retards development of the productive forces, and functions as a crisis-management device for low-productivity capitalism rather than a step toward a post-work society.