Basic Income could become the next New Deal

Andrew Yang liked to cite Thomas Paine's Citizens Dividend from Agrarian Justice as part of arguing that the Basic Income is a very American idea.  What's interesting though is that Thomas Spence criticized Paine in The Rights of Infants, he agreed with having a Basic Income but combined it with full Abolition of Private Property.  Spence was an influence on Charles Hall who Karl Marx cited as an influence.  The Basic Income was part of the Socialist Tradition before Marx was.

But in the last several years as the Basic Income has become a trendy proposal online among progressives and social democrats, a number of Socialist and Communist YouTubers have made videos on how it's bad actually because it's another Capitalist plot to appease the Proletariat with a mere reform of the Market Economy.  And the thing is The American Left has made this mistake before.

During the first term of the FDR administration both the Socialist Party of America and the CPUSA under William Z Foster opposed the New Deal because they saw it as a Capitalist plot to appease the Proletariat with a mere reform of the Market Economy.  And that decision more then anything else is what killed the early Socialist Movement in the United States.

In the 1932 Presidential Election the Socialist Party Candidate Norman Thomas got 884,885 votes and Foster got 103,307, which were both up from their 1928 numbers.  In 1936 Thomas got only 187,910 votes and the CPUSA Candidate Earl Browder got 79,315 votes.  Now Browder would actually reverse Foster's position on the New Deal but it was in 1936 itself he took over the party, it was kind of too late but still perhaps why the CPUSA didn't have as big a drop.  

Marxists love to talk about materialism, how our main objective Politically should be to advocate for The Working Class not get all caught up on some specific Utopian Vision.  It was absolutely possible to support the New Deal and Huey Long's Share Our Wealth project while still talking about how that's a drop in the bucket compared to what our Party wants to do and also criticizing the Racism in how the New Deal was being implemented.  Their decision not to do that but flat out oppose the New Deal destroyed most of the support the Socialists had in the country, they never returned to their 1932 numbers.

Caleb Maupin loves to white wash the CPUSA's New Deal era history, lying by omission to make it sound like they were always in support of the New Deal.  He calls himself a Foster Communist not a Browder Communist even though his opinions on the New Deal and the Popular Front are exactly what Browder's break with Foster was.  It also amuses me how all his hyping up of the early CPUSA's legacy ignores how the Socialist Party was always more popular, they Elected multiple Mayors the CPUSA elected none, they twice got a Representative in Congress the CPUSA never got anyone in Congress.

The Basic Income isn't Communism or Socialism, but as far as Goals achievable in the short term to do something for the Working Class it's doable alongside Universal Healthcare and Student Loan Debt Forgiveness.  We need to be seen fighting for them not against them.

Yet some Communists especially MLs actually have bought into the American fetishization of Work as a concept, and that is a problem.  Most people do want to work and not just sit around all day doing nothing, making it so they don't literally have to in order to not starve increases their bargaining power.  But some people don't, and that's why I recommend the book The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue.

The thesis of that book has nothing to do with why Marx said of certain French Marxists "If they are Marxists then I am not a Marxist". Rather it was Lafargue and Guesde's militant Anti-Reformism that he was referring to.  Now someone who's still anti-Reformism as a general rule may say Marx supported those Reforms because they organically arose out of the demands of the working class, and I'd argue the same is happening with the Basic Income, it's growing broad popularity is at it's core coming from the left of center yet being supported even by some conservatives and libertarians makes it a true manifestation of the will of the Proletariat.