this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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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
So not depending on if this is a human being who deserves basic food and shelter.
If you're incapable of working then you take advantage of the social safety nets that your government or community provides.
I never said I was against having supports in place for those who are unable to work?
Which in America, is fuck all, and the biggest capitalists have actively stopped them from being instituted. The same people who benefit a lot from having a workforce that is cheap and easily replaceable.
Okay - you're just arguing something completely different at this point.
My point was just that this post proposes a solution that doesn't actually solve anything and just makes new problems.
I'm saying that your support is irrelevant. If you tried to be put them into place, you would be fought by extremely powerful interests. This is the only possible way capitalism could be moral, we've tried to do it, and it's not happening.
That's why we look to throw that system away.
What exactly makes you think that communism is going to remove people having power over other people? That seems to just be intrinsic to humans in general, your economic system isn't going to change that.
And you can absolutely have social support systems in place if the populous pushes for them. Homeless shelters and welfare aren't impossible ideas, they're actively implemented across the world. The same goes for basic needs like healthcare.
Just because your government or community hasn't implemented it doesn't mean it's not possible to do so. It means you need to convince those around you that it's a good idea.
There are many paths to this, and I'm not yet settled on anything quite yet. I am convinced that the Marxist-Leninist branch (basically the USSR and Maoist China and the like) went completely down the wrong path; its focus on a vanguard party makes it particularly susceptible to cults of personality. Not just in the Soviet Union and such, but even much smaller groups aligned with that branch that pop up on college campuses.
A good start is getting everyone unionized. Beyond that, there is lots of theory behind mutual aid (such as (Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution], which also is something of a precursor to kin selection theory in evolution), and Anarcho-Syndicalists also have some ideas on how to organize groups into almost completely flat hierarchies that all work to mutual benefit.