The call for a universal basic income used to be a radical idea, but is now gaining traction as a serious political demand, thanks to its coverage in places like Rolling Stone (along with some other good ideas) and many other political magazines.
As a concrete, commonsense social policy, it is a pretty good place to start, and can be used in tandem with other mechanisms to address some of our deeper problems.
There's reason to be skeptical about reformist efforts at this point. It is hard to imagine a Congress such as ours (which recently voted to curtail unemployment benefits) to seriously consider a universal basic income. But of course that is what struggle is for. Crazier things have been accomplished.
A social and intellectual revolution seems to be happening from the inside out, whose adherents propose everything from dramatic economic and political reform to new conceptions of the cosmos, rationality and intuition, our relations between each other and the environment, and much more. But then that was happening before the worldwide Enlightenment revolutions as well. History tells us that corrupt political and economic elites will do everything to hold onto their power until the metaphorical (and literal) floors come out from under them.
There is this traditional conception of revolution as this violent and sudden rupture in which dramatic change follows (which itself was precipitated by a long gradual chain of incremental changes, both material and ideological, that culminated in an explosion of energy after meeting resistance), but then there is also this emergence of a new conception of revolution in radical politics which envisions revolution as an internal process in which the new grows out of the shell of the old, gradually. This latter possibility is very appealing, as the energetic forces unleashed by a traditional revolution almost always lead to cascades of violence and political repression that can take a long time to dissipate.
The Soviet Union could be said to have taken this latter path (of course after decades of cold war and proxy wars), as the crumbling state lost legitimacy and its political actors were forced to enact dramatic economic reforms, but these were reforms in which a state socialist economy was transformed into a neoliberal capitalist society in which powerful, politically connected actors were able to snap up public utilities and land, and it all took place within the bosom of an already powerful global capitalist regime. What is different about this time is that we are talking about much more radical change taking place, radical change that requires a dramatic transformation of one of the most powerful and tenacious power structures in history, which is also global, and so there is nowhere else to go: no state apparatus to take control of which is geographically safe from the global hegemon, and no populated space to escape to. The global hegemon affects the entire global ecology.
Plus I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege. From my position I see a cultural stasis, but there are cascading changes being wrought throughout the world. My own economic standing is precarious, but then sizable populations in certain Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and other regions are experiencing a daily hell on earth.
This is certainly a strange time. It is hard to say just what will happen. Just doing my best to observe very carefully and do my little part.
