"I feel like criticizing today."
"You've been criticizing all week Dave, someone has to shovel the cow shit."
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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If a society is to function people need to be doing the work that isn't enjoyable as well as the work that's enjoyable.
There's likely not enough people that get genuine enjoyment out of being a garbage man or sewer maintenance worker for a world with everyone doing what they want to work.
You have to add incentives for the less desirable labour or else the system collapses under its own weight.
The USSR gave early retirement to those that worked undesirable jobs, pretty decent incentive. Having undesirable jobs doesn't make Communism collapse.
The solution capitalism gives us is that those jobs pay less. Any able-bodied person can clean toilets, so supply and demand results in little pay for cleaning toilets. However, those same people deserve a basic human life with food, shelter, and companionship, yet they are easily priced out of this. The "incentive" you speak of is the threat of starvation.
Communism actually recognizes this. Everyone pitches in to get the basic, necessary work done. This tends to be a lot less than generally expected. Most people today are not doing work that is necessary at all.
In my home town a sanitation worker makes double the provincial minimum wage and gets benefits. That's an incentive for a job that has a low barrier to entry but undesirable labour.
The benefit of this system is that you can in fact choose this role instead of being assigned it based on the requirements of society. If the compensation isn't tempting enough then the employer will increase the compensation until it makes sense. That's how it's supposed to work at the very least.
If the current implementation isn't working then you address the issues with the implementation, you don't tear it all down and try something completely different.
That's nice. Does it work out that way for jobs with low barriers to entry across the board in your experience?
Depending on the desirability of the work compared to the compensation yes it seems to be working pretty well
Depending on . . .
So not depending on if this is a human being who deserves basic food and shelter.
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I have doubts.
Many communities in the USA don't have garbage people. Everyone takes their garbage to the dump. There are people that work at the dump.
Someone does have to build and fix sewers, but no one has to clean another person's toilet.
Also, no one only does pleasurable work, regardless of the economic system.
Everyone takes their garbage to the dump
What's the carbon footprint on that?
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A reminder - or possibly just some information - because I see this misconception so often. You can have money in communist or anarchist societies. You can reward shitty jobs, or even all jobs with money to be used for luxuries! This does not go against the principles of these social systems, despite what people often imagine. You may not have individuals racking up huge amounts of assets in the form of business empires, but you as an individual can still, idk, do work and use the output of that work to buy beer or whatever.
That is not to say that everyone will agree that these societies should have that... But just consider this before you make the "what about the sewage workers" argument.
Communism is by definition moneyless
But yes anarchy is less prescriptive
Personally though I'm sceptical that money can be without hierarchy, or that the distinction between necessities and luxuries is all that meaningful, since it's all very relative
It's funny how that imaginary Chad Stalin quote implies that you can't do any of that stuff under capitalism, or that capitalism requires any person to be limited to "one sphere of activity." In the USA we do have the freedom to choose to do any or all of that, and our only limitations towards doing them all are time and resources.
Lots of people have to work 40+ hours just to survive, that doesn't leave much energy to do things other than your paid job. And you can't just switch jobs willy nilly, pretty soon nobody would hire you anymore if your cv is full of jobs you've only held for a few weeks or months
There is no law that says you can't switch jobs whenever you want. We literally do have the freedom to do that within the framework of capitalism and the laws that govern the citizens of the USA. The reality of the situation is of course that employers generally don't like that, but employers are not the government and they don't own us. We still have our freedom to choose to pursue whatever we want for employment. These are generally good features of capitalist democracy - it's also good that employers are free not to choose unreliable candidates.
You have the freedom, if you have money. Otherwise you don't. You just have the freedom to be homeless and starve
That is generally how it works in most of the world, except for primitive hunter-gatherer societies that live beyond modern civilization.
Except that most countries do have social services to support the needy. If you are poor in the USA, you can get free food and free healthcare from local county governments.
Sooo... how does that relate to your point? That you can supposedly do what op is saying in America because freedom?
It's a reply to your comment, it says what it means already and needs no further explanation.
leftist meme
leftist meme
how dare you call uncle charlie a lefty? he's a commie for people's sake!
Those are just hobbies.
Can you walk into a l law office and be a lawyer one day, then a scientist the next?
(note: no, sovereign citizens, you are not either of these things despite what YouTube tells you)
Who the fuck would need a lawyer?
Even a communist utopia needs to have laws
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Cool. I'll fly a plane in the morning, perform open heart surgery in the afternoon and do economic forecasting in the evening.
Don't need much to do economic forecast
Yeah, but doing it well is pretty difficult. You can also just cut some guy open and hope for the best.
The fundamental issue I have with anyone who doesn't understand communism is the massive authoritarian government it takes to kill the millions of civilians. Wait was that not apart of the books? Weird how it keeps happening then
The fundamental issue I have with anyone who doesn't understand capitalism is that it is still directly resulting in mass poverty, starvation, wars for resource robbery, ignored climate crisis but somehow the grand promises of everyone being able to become rich beyond their needs or plausible desires is dangled in front of their eyes while they they are shoved all of the above problems plus pettiest sugar grain up their asses.
Given how such people can't even wait 5 minutes in a line or traffic with the physical workings of the efficient and beneficial systems being very apparent, it is not weird how it keeps perpetuating.
Ah yes, I shit talk communism, that MUST mean I simp for capitalism
Because there are only two possibilities here for some reason.
Why the narrow view of reality?
People live in an artificial binary where they believe communism and capitalism are the only two economic systems in the entire world.
I'll be bold and say it outright: communism is a fundamentally broken idea and sucks balls, and so is capitalism, but both in similar-yet-different ways.
Communism is faulty economics and fails to differentiate between man-made capital and god-given land and natural resources, grouping both as "the means of production". The problem with this is land and capital have very different properties. Where land (and natural resources) cannot be created and are zero-sum, capital must be created and is not zero-sum. Communism blatantly ignores this and has a zero-sum view on capital, meaning it suggests policies that fail to effectively produce new capital, and thus fail to effectively produce new wealth and prosperity. Further, when the state takes monopolistic control over land and capital (in addition to its existing monopoly on violence), it concentrates far too much power, which is why communist countries keep on becoming brutal dictatorships.
Capitalism, on the other hand, also fails to differentiate between land and capital, but in a different way. Instead of socializing both, it privatizes both, allowing massive rent-seeking and exploitation as a result of monopolization of land and natural resources. It also often willfully ignores that negative externalities and other market failures actually make society, on the net, poorer and less prosperous. Further, this concentration of wealth into the rent-seeking, monopolist class grants them more political power to make it even easier to rent-seek, further concentrating their own power and wealth.
What I want instead is a Georgist system that correctly identifies this distinction between land and capital, and then uses economically proven policies that respect the inherent differences between land and capital.
Hot damn someone with a reasonable and intelligent take, thank you
Capitalism v. communism is certainly a false dilemma. There are other alternatives such as Georgism as you noted. I would go further and advocate a Georgist economic democracy where all firms are structured as worker coops. Similar to the problem you identify with capitalism in that it fails to treat land and capital differently, the mainstream of Georgist thought fails to differentiate labor from capital in an important respect. Labor can't factually be transferred unlike capital @196
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Oh yeah lemme just rear cattle. Not like it's a job that requires specific skill to be good at. Also, who's gonna make the equipment to do those things?
That's such a good encapsulation lol
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Rearing cattle in the evening eh?
That's no way to talk about yer partner if you ask me
I am making my own blunder there and referring to the idea of the "communist state", I suppose closer to what we understand as socialism, rather than the idealistic communist society which, like you say, is moneyless (and stateless, which immediately separates it from say the USSR or whatever).
Yeah, but that’s the problem. Communism sort of relies on that communist state transition period. Or at least, that’s where every single communist state has turned into a dictatorship. The party-in-the-meantime never gives up their power “after a communist utopia sprouts.” That’s really the main leftist communism critique.
Socialists, communists, anarchists all have very similar ideas of a socialist utopia. But it’s how we get there where we all differ. Anarchism is communism minus the ruling party while relying on people to be good, self sustain, and fight back together when under attack. It would be great if we could have some left unity, but….well, ask the FAI how that went.
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