There are 330 million Americans living in this country right now.
2.7 million of us are on antiwork, let's just round that up to 3 million.
So, ~1% of the total population of the United States is a member of this subreddit.
If we all came together and formed a co-op, similar to health insurance co-ops, we could effectively end capitalism as we know it.
But if it was that easy for all 2.7 million of us on antiwork to agree on anything, like which Subway Series sandwich we want for dinner tonight, then we all would have ordered a Monster by now.
Right? Right.
But we all are at least anti-work, right? So, we do all at least agree on that.
Obviously, we just don't agree on what we should actually do about it.
Could enough of us come together to form a co-op if it only required $25/month from each of us in order to disburse monthly UBI payments to the members?
This is already being done right now for catastrophic health insurance.
CYAclub.com (CYA) offers catastrophic health insurance coverage up to $100k and only requires $35/month and they have millions of members.
So, if you're a freelancer like me who has legitimate plans to do sex work before ever returning to a 9 to 5, supervisor, mandatory team meetings or being chained to Slack and Microsoft Outlook ever again, then that is a good thing.
Since this late stage capitalist death cult piece of shit society ties healthcare to our jobs, something that started over 80 years ago during WWII, when health insurance should actually be treated exactly like car insurance.
I can purchase a car insurance policy out of MA with AllState even though I live in NJ. Why can't I do that with health insurance?
I can choose what kind of car insurance I want — do I want the bells and whistles and everything covered or do I only want to be covered if I have a huge car crash and my vehicle is totaled?
But with health insurance, my employer chooses what kind of health insurance I have — I am militantly childfree but while I was still a corporate slave, I was forced to pay every paycheck for an expensive healthcare plan that included adoption and IVF — what sense does that make?
Almost like employer sponsored health insurance is designed to screw us.
So, if I was to have a heart attack or get hit by a car while picking up the sub we all decided to order, for just $35/month, CYA would send me a $100k so that I wouldn't have to file for bankruptcy and have my credit ruined for the crime of my heart giving out on me or an idiotic driver plowing into me while I was just minding my business walking to Subway.
Many religious communities also have health insurance co-ops among their members, similar to CYA, where all of the members pool their resources together and pay a low monthly membership amount and, when the members suffer an emergency medical illness, injury or accident, they receive a similar payout from the co-op as mentioned above with CYA.
What is stopping us from taking this co-op model for catastrophic health insurance and applying it to disburse monthly UBI payments instead of payouts for medical emergencies?
CYA has millions of members and there are millions of us right here on this subreddit.
Since there are so many of us, similarly to CYA, we could all pay a low membership amount, say $25/month.
The power in the co-op would be that it would be millions of us paying into the collective every single month.
Just like with CYA, every month when a member pays their $25 membership fee, they would receive a UBI payout from the co-op, let's say of $1k.
If there were millions of members, this would be easy to achieve.
$1k/month is more than enough to live on if the individual resides in the southern or mid-west regions of the country in either a 1BR apartment or if they live in a shared living space with other adults to split their living expenses.
Either way, frugal living and a rejection of mindless consumerism should ensure that the $1k/month is enough to live off of. Something like CYA could be utilized for the members for catastrophic health insurance coverage.
Where would the $25/month come from when all of the members of the co-op would be quitting their jobs prior to joining the co-op?
Anything and everything that isn't a W-2, 1040 job. So, not just corporate, but academia, non-profit, fast food, food service, retail, etc. jobs — anything that requires a W-2 is what the co-op would be against.
The answer is anything that is freelance and entrepreneurial. Anything that is 1099 and W-9.
Starting your own business, farming, raising chickens and selling the eggs, making crafts with your hands and selling them, creating and selling art, cooking & baking and selling the food, sewing and selling clothes, writing, speaking, freelancing, giving people rides, delivering groceries, running errands and doing tasks for people, one-off projects, short-term projects, long-term projects, social media management, online content creation, anything and everything that doesn't involve you working for someone else and having your hours dictated to you.
As long as there were enough members, and as long as all of the members paid their membership fees, the money would be there for the monthly UBI payouts.
I would hope people would be incentivized to pay their monthly membership fees by the ideal of ending modern day slavery which is our current capitalist system that demands that people work like tireless machines in exchange for being able to afford to live.
I truly believe that if millions of us could band together and reject the myth and the lie of the axiomatic individual that our current capitalist system is built on, that we could take the current system down, not through violence or force, but through togetherness.
We outnumber them, point blank period.
But they also have more weapons than us and they have the military, police, law and prison systems on their side. Rebellions and uprisings not backed in some way by the military really don't tend to work out.
We need to use what we have in our favor — the fact that we vastly outnumber them — against them, but not in a violent mob or uprising, but in a peaceful co-op that pools our money and resources together then distributes it amongst ourselves.
I really think it could work, people would just need to band together and then someone (or maybe a committee of some sort) would have to run and oversee the co-op, collect the monthly membership fees and distribute the monthly UBI payments.
We could even try to do it on here as an experiment.
Look at your respective paychecks if you are currently working for someone else. How much is taken out every paycheck for health insurance plans that you didn't pick but your employer did? For things that you have no say for and that the company decided on?
Wouldn't you rather potentially make less from a monthly UBI payout that comes from other individuals, like yourselves, vs make what you currently do from a system that is literally set up to systematically enslave, disenfranchise, exploit, abuse and discard you whenever it is convenient for them?
We can end our current late stage capitalist death cult system if we all come together.
They don't outnumber us, WE outnumber THEM.
We shouldn't be afraid of their guns, laws or prisons.
They should be afraid of us coming together.