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On May 12, 2026, at 12:42 PM, Peggy Dobbins wrote: Dear Ellen Brown, I have always appreciated your work and trusted where Ellen Brown is pointing more than where others say. I want to share a couple of insights with you that I think are useful to those genuinely trying to guide humanity toward all benefitting from the leaps made in technological productivity during the capitalist era capped now by A I, without being dehumanized. One is making use of the fact that there are two terms for what is referred to in most languages as both "work" and "labor." As Marx and Engels and Adam Smith and Ricardo would agree, and now as you inform me Benjamin Franking and Henry Carey also I feel certain: labor is the sine qua non of the on going process of humanization. Our homo sapiens species becomes humane, interdependent and civilly so, hence civilized by labor. What is a defintion of labor across civilizations? Labor ≡ time spent doing what another wants* as they want it done to earn* the means* to get what one wants from yet another. a more crass, shorthand definition is Labor ≡ bossed time for pay Work may refer to time spent performing the same activity, for the same purpose, with the same skill. But work may be unbossed and work may be unpaid. I.E. Free. in one's free time, free from mandates, free from doing something one wouldn't do, or wouldn't do that way if it weren't one's job, ie, bossed. hence Work of Art, Scientific work, even Housework. Obra de arte, Œuvre d'art. Not labor of art, trabajo de art, travail d'art.* Thus in a very advanced state of humanity, we may Labor for Freedom to Work freely, for free. It's my opinion, that humans need to continue relations of labor vis a vis one another to maintain humanity as civil and interdependent, civilly interdependent, civilized. IE for human civilization to survive. I can conceive of everyone performing some labor, doing something they wouldn't do if someone else didn't want them to do it and they do it to earn the means to get what they want from yet another[s]. Even a terminally ill patient can perform the labor of smiling while taking the experimental drug a medical scientist administers to earn the possibility of seeing their grandchild graduating from college on the zoom screen. We should all contribute a little labor time to earn the means to enjoy the most advanced goods and services human society has developed artificial intelligence to produce with no more human labor than programming and monitoring it. *want ≡ desire or need *earn, because there is a moral sense by both employer and employee that the latter has earned what the former must pay to reproduce the labor power. This becomes questionable once we are dealing with A I. I only sense its relevance up to now. *means ≡ money, or pay, in our epoch *words for labor and work in various language ------- The other insight I'd like to make accessible to you is a counter intuitive one derived from asking how class and patrilineal inheritance emerges from within matrilineal societies subsisting on the same species in their ecological niche, but overtime specializing in cultivating the productivity of one species, initially as their own most reliable food. Eventually resolving conflicts by "equitable exchanges of different forms of labor time" through intermarriage. Thence eventually a primitive form of Surplus Value, "surplus labor time due to one, yet due the other" emerges from "equitable exchanges of different forms of labor time, the technological productivity of which develops unevenly inevitably." I'm sure I still don't quite have it right or it wouldn't be so hard to convey. But I'm also sure that the uneven development of technological productivity has a counter-intuitive effect in enriching the one whose labor has not become more technologically productive at the expense of the one whose has, but they are still dependent upon and must abide by the rule of the other. This latter insight comes interaction between my primary interest in 1) how matrilineal societies became patrilineal class societies without outside conquest by societies that had to be traceable themselves to pre-patrilineal ones, 2)and conversations with Italians emphasizing "uneven development of technological productivity" at the 3) 2001 international conference on Marxism in Yunnan. Margaret (Peggy) Powell Dobbins (87) Atlanta, Georgia cf: https://peggydobbins.net facebook discussion groups Wikipedia & Emory University archives. On May 10, 2026, at 11:13 AM, Ellen Brown from Web of Debt wrote: Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame THE ABUNDANCE PARADIGM: WHY AI FORCES RETHINKING MONEY ITSELF—Part 1 ELLEN BROWN MAY 10 READ IN APP A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has long been proposed as a way to cushion the blow of jobs lost to automation. Under that model, everyone receives a modest monthly payment – enough to cover basic needs and prevent extreme poverty. But Elon Musk has gone further. On April 16, he posted on X: “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. “AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.” Rather than a subsistence stipend, Universal High Income (UHI) would be a level of income allowing ordinary people to live well in a world where machines do most of the work. Musk has also said that AI and robotics are the only things that can solve the massive U.S. debt crisis. That sounds promising, but where will the government get the money to pay the UHI? Critics say any government that tried it would go bankrupt. There are also other concerns, which will be addressed in Part 2 of this article. Here we will look at the financial underpinnings: why UHI is even thinkable, why AI forces a reexamination of how money enters the economy, why the current system cannot scale to meet what is coming, and the implicit transition needed to meet that challenge. Continue reading here. SHARE LIKE COMMENT RESTACK © 2026 Ellen Brown 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe Start writing