you know how people, especially on twitter, try and share their absolute dogshit takes without a care for humility, just unbribled stubbornness
everybody seem so full of themselves and I just can't bring myself to trust anyone unless they show a hint of doubt over their own thoughts, and that's flat out absent from most social media
idk, I don't think I did a good jb describing what I feel, it's hard to accurately put into words
but like, do you have stuff you usually keep to yourself, because like you know the thought isn't well rounded or something and you don't want to say something incorrect. or like interrogations about stuff you can't really answer by yourself
Would anyone really choose to do certain unpleasant but necessary jobs (garbage collector, janitors, farm labor in places where it hits 110°+ regularly) if it weren't a matter of life or death? Like, some jobs need to be done and can't yet be automated, but how much would you need to pay someone to willingly subject themselves to them? Or are there actually people out there who enjoy (or don't mind) doing those jobs?
If I was paid a decent wage, I would be a janitor or a garbage collector in a heartbeat, i don't find cleaning and maintenance work all that boring, and garbage collection is a half day job
Oh, alright then. I forget that I'm a huge pussy sometimes
A lot of those jobs could be made more pleasant with a good standard of living and low hours. I genuinely like cleaning bathrooms and carrying heavy objects; wouldn't want to do that 8 hours a day for barely enough money to exist in our society, but a few hours a day and my current standard of living? Yeah.
I hate farm labor but I assume it's someone's jam.
I like digging holes and day drinking so it's either farm labor or field geology for me.
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What are you, some kind of communist?
People would do jobs because they serve their community.
In capitalism, automation keeps costs down. Under socialism, it reduces the amount of work necessary to achieve the same result.
No one would have to spend 40 hours a week doing it. Imagine the amount of labour necessary for our standard of living, divided amongst the numbers of available workers. Consider how much of out "economy" is just bullshit industries like finance, marketing, consultation, etc. I'd spent 4 hours a week doing almost anything, if it paid the same as 40, and let me spend the rest of the week fucking around.
Like woofwoof, I sort of enjoy handling filth. I can see myself working full-time janitor in our utopia. When I was working fast-food, I was handling most of the gross stuff, because my coworkers didn't like to, and hearing them sigh in relief was enough for me, honestly
They don't have to be done under the brutal conditions of capitalism. Look at farm labor - those jobs would probably still suck but they would suck a lot less if you weren't busting your ass on threat of being fired and you could take a break and just hang out in the shade or in the A/C and drink somethin cold and had a standard of living like a computer programmer
This made me rememember a great passage from Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread' that says exactly the same: It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a scientific laboratory And it is no less evident that it would be advantageous to make it so. In a spacious and well-ventilated factory work is better; it is easy to introduce small ameliorations, of which each represents an economy of time or of manual labour. And if most of the workshops we know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the workers are of no account in the organization of factories, and because the most absurd waste of human energy is its distinctive feature.
Nevertheless, now and again, we already find some factories so well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the work, be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five hours a day and if every one had the possibility of varying it according to his tastes.
Look at this factory, unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. It is perfect as far as regards sanitary and intelligent organization. It occupies fifty English acres of land, fifteen of which are roofed with glass. The pavement of fire-proof bricks is as clean as that of a miner’s cottage, and the glass roof is carefully cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing else. In this factory are forged steel ingots or blooms weighing as much as twenty tons; and when you stand thirty feet from the immense furnace, whose flames have a temperature of more than a thousand degrees, you do not guess its presence save when its great jaws open to let out a steel monster. And the monster is handled by only three or four workmen, who now here, now there, open a tap, causing immense cranes to move by pressure of water in the pipes."
In addition to the other good responses you have, most of the early communist thinkers (not sure how this idea holds up today) beloved that under communism, workers would change roles pretty often, that one week you might be working in administration, then in a factory, then somewhere else.
It was part of the reason that marxists argue that after a long enough period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the “state” as we understand it would cease to exist - if every worker is also a member of the administration, with people constantly moving in and out, then essentially everyone is the state. And if everyone is the state, it’s no longer a state (because in this analysis the whole point of a state is for one class to subjugate another class, like the bourgeois state we currently live under exists to subjugate the proletariat).
All this is to say, in a future communist society someone might be like “oh man, I’m on garbage collection this week!”, but it wouldn’t be your indefinite, soul crushing existence.
Yeah, but you know, skills and experience are a thing
in some cases most leftists would argue they can be a detriment - the more people that stick around working in administrative positions, the more the bureaucracy grows and ossifies.
I’m not an expert on the matter, but I’d say the thinkers that were putting forward these ideas were of the opinion that under communism we’d be working with an educated and organised proletariat, capable of building individual and organisational knowledge to the point where any member of the class could easily jump from one role to another. At least in terms of the day-to-day running of society and production, obviously you’d need medical specialists, but even in that industry, your average worker could do admin or maintenance etc.
Now if you want to have a conversation about whether that was perhaps idealistic/utopian thinking on their part, that’s another matter. I could see the argument on both sides, but the idea that a liberated working class, organising and educating itself, couldn’t reach that level of general skill isn’t completely unrealistic. And although we try to remain materialists, on some level leftists have to have SOME idea that things can be better in the future, otherwise why the hell are we even bothering, lol.
Even if you could get every worker to be skilled in the use of every tool, or machine, or computer program or whatever else for every job, skills get rusty if you don't use them. And with experience comes speed, someone who has fixed trucks for years will be faster at it than someone who has done it for a week.
Even things like cleaning, which some (incorrectly) see as a no skill job, benefits from experience. Have you seen someone who rarely cleans floors try and mop something? It takes them ages and they usually mop themselves into a corner.
Ok, but if you have a section of society that spends their lives mopping floors, and a section of society that spends their lives making lofty decisions about everybody’s life in that society, you have essentially just created a new form of class society. How do you square that circle?
Dunno how the fuck you got that from what I said
I haven't started reading it myself yet, but I think Towards a New Socialism addresses this and other related topics. The authors have made it available for free online. I'm probably massively oversimplifying but I think authors show pretty definitively you can use a combo of labor vouchers and socially necessary time plus a sort of "market" for jobs based on necessity and whether there's enough people working on it. Basically you get central planning without the command and authoritarianism associated with "making" people do work they don't want to.
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