And all of this defiantly ignores the enormous impacts of globalization and automation on the "getting better" metric.
Random side note: Here is a snippet from a Lincoln speech -> https://pastebin.com/quzZqbiK
My unsubstantiated opinion would be that Marx probably would of changed his mind at some point about making it some sort of collectivist movement.
Its still capitalism and you still benefit from seeking a higher paying job but once most jobs have been automated it lets people easily train for better jobs without having to constantly report back to some defective government department and randomly getting their payments cut off.
UBI can exist in a capitalist structure. It can exist in another structure. It is not mutually exclusive to capitalism.
And when the day comes where job demand far exceeds supply, it becomes an inevitability.
Basically.
> Its still capitalism
No, the modern welfare state is not capitalism, it's a socialist reaction to capitalism. Now, you can argue that it's “bourgeois socialism” that tends to reinforce the class relations of capitalism and which inevitably reverts to capitalism, as Marx—before it actually became the thing that completely displaced old-school capitalism in the developed world—did. But it's not, itself, capitalism. And the longer it is the dominant system of the developed world without a wholesale reversion to unmitigated capitalism, the harder to pure form of the Marxian charge against bourgeois socialism is to defend.
You have this completely backwards. The welfare state is a bourgeois reaction to socialism. It is capitalism with a bulwark against revolt.