Here’s what I’m responding to, put it in pastebin to slightly anonymize this, though I’m sure its easy to find the original source, that’s OK.

https://pastebin.com/hkH5gVGp

These are my bullet points for a three section plan to respond. Please let me know your thoughts and how they can be improved. I hope to write with a tone that gives a Marxist viewpoint without alienating a willing, open minded lib reader.

How will people support themselves?

• Technology is a social phenomenon and not a march of progress separate from material conditions
• Why automation is a problem under capitalism
• What private property is and how it is distinct from personal property
• Why it is just and good for private property to be socialized and personal property retained
• How a socialist society would benefit from increased automation

Do we need universal basic income (UBI) to sustain people once their jobs are replaced by technology? What are people going to do to keep themselves occupied?

• UBI as a cash payment does not solve precarity. It keeps consumer spending up and maintains a flow of income to landlords, mortgage holders, grocery monopolies…
• A universal basic needs guarantee would grasp the problem by the root.
• We could instead enshrine full education, adequate housing, all basic needs including health, leisure time, and dignified work for the able, as rights of everyone in our society.
• Democratic planning mechanisms could replace the autocratic petty fiefdoms of profit-seeking businesses in all these sectors.
• We have the means to communicate with the whole body politic at light speed, and create revolutionary education such that “every cook can govern”.

The cost of living and the housing crisis are definitely part of the labour shortage, but they are just a symptom of a greater issue — the world is getting older and we are running out of people to staff all kinds of jobs.

• The role that human labour-power plays in the economy has been diminishing gradually since the Industrial Revolution.

• The fact that resources spent on human’s wages were more and more outnumbered by resources spent on constant capital (raw materials, machinery, equipment) is obfuscated by the fact that markets grew such that real wages and the wage-working part of the world’s population generally grew.

• The labour shortage is a framing that is sympathetic to business and corporate power.

• The obvious solution, recognized by everyone from Joe Biden to TODO: find other random public figures who commented on this, is to increase wages.

• If the entreprises or the wider system cannot handle this, that failure is the problem. Our mode of production should meet our needs or be discarded.

• Capitalism is no longer a dynamic system, and the global, general rate of profit is in decline.

• It is a time of difficulty for small business, increasing malaise for big business, and more significantly, real precarity and hardship for the working class (all those who work for a wage to sustain themselves).

• Capitalism will not eventually fix itself, but it will eventually destroy itself.