If we want UBI, why not go full communalism or anarcho-collectivism?
I'm totally stealing that line.
The larger point is that not only is the idea of a UBI decent and moral, because nobody should worry about being homeless or starving in a rich society, but because its much cheaper the the alternative! Only someone completely blinded by ideology (or somehow profiting off of the existing system) would argue that its better to spend $50,000 dollars a year per homeless person to manage shelters and run a bureaucracy if simply giving that homeless person $25,000 a year and achieves a better overall result.
But it isn't. A fifth of the UK working age population, for example, is neither registered as unemployed or earning money. Most of them aren't homeless, or entitled to disability benefits and aren't registered as unemployed because for whatever reason they don't need the money. All of them would be eligible for basic income.
You can afford to provide much better support for homeless people (many of whose bigger problems cannot be addressed simply by providing them with a regular income) if your budget isn't being stretched by the need to subsidise the perceived basic needs of huge numbers of content people that aren't actually interested in claiming subsidies.
You can tax their parents and give the students UBI. The sick will cost anyhow. Or you can exclude students from UBI, that's what you are doing now. I'm not against either.
And don't forget that, after all win the minimum, that's the new zero.
While there's no denying that capitalism can be ruthless and unrepentant, and what we have for capitalism currently actually is that, calling the progress of capitalism "ruthless" and "unrepentant" is just as loaded as calling UBI communism/socialism/etc, and leads to needlessly heated debates and ideological headbutting. It fails to convince anyone of anything.
Even if capitalism isn't ruthless and unrepentant, the value of human labor goes down, and isn't necessarily undermined, when capitalism seeks efficiency. There is no strict requirement that capitalism be ruthless and unrepentant—those are, in fact, human traits that are impossible to apply to the unthinking and unfeeling system that is capitalism.
When capitalism replaces human labor with machines, it isn't to undermine the value of human labor, it's to be more efficient. Ultimately, the result is the same, as you describe: humans are unable to exploit their labor for even basic living. But calling out capitalism as some kind of evil hydra that explicitly sets out to destroy the lives and livelihood of the working class is unproductive. That is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism, and of capitalism gaining increased prominence during an age when human labor itself had high intrinsic value but was also relatively abundant. It is a side effect which must be addressed.
I find it much more effective to couch UBI in terms of the end result of capitalism: it makes no sense for a capitalistic system to use relatively inefficient humans to do work that machines can do faster and cheaper. To ensure and give inefficient humans jobs that capitalism could otherwise find ways to do sounds more like a socialist makework ideal than UBI does. It is actually in capitalism's best interest to pay people to stay out the areas where they can not perform tasks as well as machines can. This frees up people to find other avenues of contribution, perhaps finding further efficiencies, without using up all their time and energy leveraging their faculties purely to stay alive.
But for whom is it more efficient? The capital owners or the non-capital owners? What happens when the non-capital owners are of no use to the capital owners? That's the problem with trying to excuse the abuses that are permitted within capitalism. Rather than addressing that abuse in an effective way, all I see UBI doing is formalizing the concept of charity. Rather than discussing real alternatives like sharing in the actual ownership of capital, mutual aid societies, worker owned cooperatives, and the like, it seems the powers that be would rather just throw a tiny slice of the wealth to the people for the sake of retaining control over capital. So, I'm not all that friendly towards UBI advocates unless it becomes clear the laws are going to be changed in a manner that emphasizes the working class's right to ownership of capital (via some of the means I've suggested earlier).
How is capitalism exploiting workers that it doesn't employ? The history of capitalism is littered with abuses and exploitation of the working class, but that has nothing to do with UBI, and it isn't the case that UBI is some kind of make-up for capitalism's past abuses. The goal is to fix the system to avoid the abuses going forward. We can lament the past all we want, but only by acknowledging and understanding the past can we strive to fix it by making changes that will reap rewards in the present and the future; lamenting what is already done is a distraction, short of having a time machine.
Rather than addressing that abuse in an effective way, all I see UBI doing is formalizing the concept of charity. Rather than discussing real alternatives like sharing in the actual ownership of capital, mutual aid societies, worker owned cooperatives, and the like, it seems the powers that be would rather just throw a tiny slice of the wealth to the people for the sake of retaining control over capital.
Providing a basic, consistent income to everyone isn't sharing in the fruits of capitalism, the ownership of capital? The owners of capital get to reap it's benefits. If everyone reaps its benefits, then is not everyone an owner? Distribution of the fruits of capitalism, equally to all, is effectively the same thing as communal ownership of capital.
Considering UBI to be a form of charity seems to be asking for a requirement that recipients (ie, everyone) somehow "give back" to the system, contribute in some way — that would be the only way to make it not be a form of charity. But this is short-sighted. In the classical capitalistic setup, the owners, by definition, are the only ones who can reap the fruits of capitalism, merely by being the owners, with no requirement that they contribute back to the system. Gain without contribution, no matter who is doing the gaining, sounds like charity. The point of UBI is to allow everyone to reap the fruits, which effectively makes everyone indistinguishable from owners.
Unless you're selling to those relatively inefficient humans because they're your customers, and they have no disposable income - something that UBI won't fix.
Capitalism is like any other ideology - you can make up just-so stories about what it "should" do to be "efficient", but ultimately it's just a way of legitimising power differentials that would otherwise be considered shockingly immoral.
And so is UBI. Because while it may, if we're lucky, keep people from starving, what's needed isn't just UBI but free access to continuing education at all levels, access to useful social networks, and other kinds of social capital.