> A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.
Sometimes, the needs of the community are such that the work to fulfill those needs is distasteful to most people. Until such time as such jobs can genuinely be completely roboticized, to whom should janitorial work be distributed? Garbage collection? Plumbing out backed-up toilets? Going out in the freezing cold to plow snow from the roads? Does anyone seriously believe that such work would be happily accepted full-time by anyone over, say, an office job, because why, they'll be socially celebrated for it? Or that it would be politically tenable to draft the wealthy and middle-class to occasionally take shifts for these jobs, as if they were a new kind of jury duty?
Where I’m from (in California) the garbage collection is done by a private company, and it looks like a pretty nice job if you’re physically fit. And it’s not looked down on at all, people there know what hauling their own garbage is like.
Snow removal is very high status and pretty, er, cool because of the big machines involved, and its government work with the pay and benefits you’d expect. Probably only the postmaster is as universally appreciated up there.
I’d happily drive the snowplow if it paid half what a software job pays. The only downside is you can’t really drink in the winter.
Plumbing is very entrepreneurial, especially the emergency “unblock my pipe” kind. That person could easily be making more than you and I.
So while surely there are some jobs that are miserable, many of them connected to factory farming of meat, I don’t think “office job” is automatically enticing to everyone. And there is still plenty of social status in necessary jobs, if done in an actual community.
You're making my point. Today, under a capitalist economy, these undesirable jobs can be made desirable because of privatization or high or stable income that is offered as renumeration. But under a socialist system that simply assigns these jobs to people, "according to society's needs", with no other distinction offered, then you will find few takers.
They're not exactly making your point. Today those incentives are required because individuals are raised to glorify wealth and success. It doesn't stand to reason that a different environment wouldn't lead to different results.
In Japan students are expected to clean their schools. It's not looked down upon; everyone has a shared responsibility for spaces they utilize. Cultivating that kind of environment leads to a cleaner society in general. One could easily imagine rotating janitorial/firefighter/etc shifts for able-bodied citizens the way we expect people to answer jury summons.
There are ways to motivate people beyond the purely economic, even if it runs counter to our upbringing.
> Today those incentives are required because individuals are raised to glorify wealth and success.
Nobody becomes a janitor to become wealthy or successful, so wealth and success are not what motivates people today to become janitors.
> Japan
In the army, we were required to clean our own barracks; the janitorial work wasn't contracted out. Shared spaces were on a rotating shift. It still sucked. Believe me, nobody was volunteering for extra shifts of the shared spaces.
What you're getting wrong is thinking that socialism would assign random jobs to random people, or somethng alike. Instead, a socialist system would probably consist of self-managed work where the benefit would be helping your community and getting to live in such a community where everyone works towards the benefit of the community. The surplus value of the work you do, and the work you need to survive like food production and distribution, would be distributed among the workers, not the owners.
My argument is that society has some needs that are unfulfillable if you simply expect that ordinary people will pick up the slack, because it's the kind of work that people find distasteful.
Consider when garbage collection worker unions go on strike, and garbage starts to pile up and up because it's no longer being hauled away. Surely people are motivated to solve that problem because having piles of trash everywhere is disgusting. Surely people would be respected by their neighbors for solving the problem. But does anyone lift a finger and say, I'm happy to volunteer my time taking my trash and my neighbors' trash to the dump so that our streets will be clean? Does anyone say, oh I wish I could do that for myself and my neighbors', and the only reason I'm not is because I respect the union's strike?
It's the same thing in companies, by the way. There's no such real thing as self-managed teams. Anywhere that tries, if you inspect the work put out by those teams, you will almost invariably find that people have cut corners on the aspects of the job which they think are boring or stupid or otherwise distasteful. It is incredibly rare to find people who have the integrity to not only have a standard but to hold themselves to that standard.
There have been and still are socialist economies. Jobs pay differently and people choose them. Central planning incentivises necessary but unpleasant jobs.
The main feature is that workers collectively run workplaces, municipalities, regions and ultimately the state. The rest of the details are up to said workers to work out among themselves.
No. Fundamentally, in a socialist system your compensation is relative to your need, not to the value of the task at hand, regardless of whether that compensation is cash, vacation days, or something else.
Who decides whether there is need for a receptionist that watches TV all day and occasionally yells at teenagers smoking in the hall? How is such job compensated? How do you measure consequences if such job disappears?
What people would want to do might look different if you took away all the bullshit jobs and jobs tied to peddling endless consumption on people. Both my Grandfathers were janitors, no one looked down on them, they enjoyed their jobs and took pride in it, they both got paid a decent enough for lower-middle-class wage.
Get rid of all the jobs that don't directly benefit your community and what people would want to do for their community would change drastically.
I'm not saying janitorial work isn't an honest profession, I'm saying nobody prefers janitorial work. Nobody in their childhood dreams of growing up and becoming a janitor. Your grandfathers can at the same time be someone who found dignity in that work and made the best of the hand they were dealt, and at the same time be someone who would prefer a different career path had a genuine choice been offered to them.
I think you overestimate how much "profession" plays a role here. I think people only really care about doing honest and worthwhile work. No one have any idea what they "want" to do in 5 to 10 years.
The problem that I see with work today is that the value from my work is so hard to derive that I can't help but see it as pointless. I mean what value have I generated from writing a bunch of code that is used to do some analysis? How is my company/industry providing value to society again?
I think IF people find genuine satisfaction from their work, then they are more likely to think that it is their "dream" profession. That is to say that what the profession is doesn't really matter as much as what the person think of their work, whatever that is.
For instance, if janitors is a highly respected and well paying job, would people still think less of sweeping floors and flushing toilets?
> I mean what value have I generated from writing a bunch of code that is used to do some analysis? How is my company/industry providing value to society again?
Does somebody pay money for your company/industry's product? If so then they're getting more value than the money they paid (unless they were coerced somehow into buying the product). All companies solve a problem for somebody, and indeed one of the reasons why a fully planned economy would be inefficient is because no planner can fully intuit all the problems in society which need to be solved (since the only way that question is not political is if it's reduced to the simple rubric of whether or not someone will pay money for a solution).
> For instance, if janitors is a highly respected and well paying job, would people still think less of sweeping floors and flushing toilets?
You're presuming that primary job satisfaction comes from external social validation. Time and time again we see that in cases where you would think that is the case, e.g. doctors who are well respected by society, children who are pushed into those careers by their parents can sometimes end up really unhappy because the internal motivation was never there, and many people who end up in that situation end up quitting and switching careers because life is too short to be in a career you hate just to make your parents happy.
Nobody is naturally internally motivated to pick up other people's shit. Societies with high levels of public cleanliness are that way because people in those societies clean up after themselves in public, not because people elect to spend their free time on a personal crusade to clean up after others.
I mean, in America? Right now? Maybe not... okay definitely not but I ask the same thing about Higher-taxes for the betterment of all. No way it would happen here - the people wouldn't accept it but it does work elsewhere and the people there are, by the ways we currently measure, way happier than we are.
I think a culture that teaches the value of community and does a great deal to impart on the youth that we have the nice, comfortable lives (with arguably more freedom) is because we share those burdens and its part of our civic duty... that its patriotic to do so. I could see that working out.
Plus how crazy is it to think that cultures and societies did operate similarly in the past, pre-industrialization? Isn't this the basis for the family unit?
I don't disagree, but you need to be very careful how you define community. A community that is defined by who is included nearly always cannot escape an implicit declaration of who is excluded, and a community which includes everybody is no community at all. When you have an in-group and an out-group, you sow the early seeds of conflict and discord.
> Isn't this the basis for the family unit?
No, this is the basis for the tribe, with similar concerns about intertribal conflict. Modern societies enjoy such peace and improved quality-of-life outcomes precisely because the state largely subsumes these tribes, and where the state is unsuccessful at doing so (e.g. religious affiliation), has at least succeeded in eliminating much of the worst of intertribal conflict within the state's sphere of control.
> but you need to be very careful how you define community. A community that is defined by who is included nearly always cannot escape an implicit declaration of who is excluded, and a community which includes everybody is no community at all. When you have an in-group and an out-group, you sow the early seeds of conflict and discord.
Okay but, as far as I can read this its just universally true? Respectfully, you're not making the case for it being impossible and you're pointing to something that literally exists now. If it's hard, cool, I'm not afraid of difficult challenges, I honestly believe most people aren't afraid either.
> No, this is the basis for the tribe, with similar concerns about intertribal conflict.
That's fine, a bigger circle of people is exactly why I believe that your premise I was originally responding to doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I think in the present day people are able to operate in several different tribes that are not in serious struggle with one another and there's nothing concrete to point to (as far as I know) that there's an upper limit?
In another comment you mention that "No one would choose to be a Janitor" and I think that is rooted in "At the snap of the finger we'd be socialist and that would cause chaos" kind of thinking. "Being a Janitor" is only a "bad thing" due to our present culture. I certainly don't think it's less important that someone is a Janitor as opposed to a Lawyer or something - The reason people "Don't" want to be Janitors right now is less to do with 'the job' and whatever stereotypes you have in your head but because it's one of the jobs that doesn't pay enough for someone to live comfortably. I don't think its a huge leap to believe that if you could live comfortably and with dignity as a Janitor, people would absolutely do it.
> you're not making the case for it being impossible and you're pointing to something that literally exists now. If it's hard, cool, I'm not afraid of difficult challenges, I honestly believe most people aren't afraid either.
I'm not making the case for it being impossible not because I believe it to be possible but because I'm coming from a place of humility that I may be wrong about it being impossible, because I honestly don't know all the relevant factors. But certainly I'm not familiar with any cases where it worked.
> I certainly don't think it's less important that someone is a Janitor as opposed to a Lawyer or something
Rationally, I agree with you here...
> The reason people "Don't" want to be Janitors right now is less to do with 'the job' and whatever stereotypes you have in your head but because it's one of the jobs that doesn't pay enough for someone to live comfortably.
... but here I disagree. Cleaning up after strangers is demeaning work, and not because of suicidal moirés but on an evolutionary level. You spread your shit to mark your territory, because the smell of shit told people to go away. Being forced to hold your nose and clean it up is not what marks a leader, it is what marks someone who has no other choice.
I think the people who volunteer to clean up their community beach, river, stream, city street would disagree with you. There's enough pushback to your current position that I can even think of memes that talk about this very thing
Also, this appeal to nature really doesn't hold up to scrutiny either. We do things that "go against our evolutionary nature" all the time. For example: None of us spread our shit anywhere. Or how, due to current culture and city design, people largely live isolated physically from larger communities. The list goes on.
The dynamics of group volunteering are different. When you get together with people to clean up a beach, the cleanup is the proximate reason you're there, but really you're there to meet up with others and socialize, with attendant interests like virtue-signaling and the like.
Go to any cleanup event like that and ask how many people do it by themselves, whether for fun or from a sense of moral duty, when there is nobody else to see them do it or to do it with them. Certainly there is no storage of places that need to be cleaned up, and would benefit by the efforts of individuals.
In this thread you've said both that people won't do 'unsavory' work, like cleaning, for social accolades but also that the people who do volunteer to clean up public spaces do it for social accolades (Virtue signaling)
I'm not going to pretend to know the motivations of all people who clean up beaches but it is unlikely that the overwhelming majority do it simply for clout farming. People are more than one thing. Regardless they are just one example of so many examples of good public work that people do right now - in a culture that I would argue does not meaningfully incentivize this behavior. I don't think whether or not people do it when they are alone is relevant here. We're literally arguing about whether people would in a different culture, not the selfish one we currently occupy. I think a society like that is not only possible but necessary.
But anyway, last thing I'll say is that I get the sense that your view is more informed by a pessimism about "how people are" - and that how they are is concrete and unchanging - rather than about data or thinking more holistically.
That's an upper-limit for social relationships not signing on to things conceptually - for example: Taxes. We know that our taxes go towards making things for all ~350 million of us (USA) or however populous your country and we're capable of recognizing that as a good thing. Or, at the very least, a necessary evil?
Same problem as communism, no? "We'll need a preemptive stage where we have a few guys, "the party", calling all the shots for the entire population, but once we get things straightened out we'll return the power to the worker, pinky swear"
Unless you go to explicitly authoritatian circles most communists (atleast the western ones I interact with) are explicitly against so-called Vanguard parties. A hypothetical communist revolution can be a slow transition without needing an authoritarian party to rule foe the course of it. Autocrats don't really want to give up their power.
Another 30 years of wage stagnation, rising income inequality, and shared prosperity running on empty and the average Joe will be willing to give much shadier characters than "the party" a try.
Sometimes, the needs of the community are such that the work to fulfill those needs is distasteful to most people. Until such time as such jobs can genuinely be completely roboticized, to whom should janitorial work be distributed? Garbage collection? Plumbing out backed-up toilets? Going out in the freezing cold to plow snow from the roads? Does anyone seriously believe that such work would be happily accepted full-time by anyone over, say, an office job, because why, they'll be socially celebrated for it? Or that it would be politically tenable to draft the wealthy and middle-class to occasionally take shifts for these jobs, as if they were a new kind of jury duty?
This is not a serious suggestion.