Under capitalism, a lot of the time, highly dangerous jobs are also highly paid. Kind of a balance that the individual decides to engage with. Same idea behind getting an advanced degree in STEM or law. I think of my job by example, I’m a power plant operator at a large combined cycle plant. No fucking shot I’d be doing this if the pay wasn’t good. I’m around explosive and deadly hot shit all day.
Under Maoism or Stalinism, aka the dictatorship of the dictator pretending to act for the proletariat? You are ordered to do it, for your own good and the good of the Party. If you don’t follow orders, you just get shot; and your family is put in a prison camp, your children raped and beaten and forced to labor.
Under real stateless, classless communism? Nobody knows, because that hasn’t existed yet. Anyone claiming to know exactly how it might operate is talking out of their hat. Marx is pretty clear on that.
I mean, there was a time before states and classes were invented.
Yeah, where the dangerous job was “hunt something so you don’t starve”, the motivation for doing the dangerous job is pretty obvious.
Not if you live in any kind of group. “Why should I go hunt? You do it.” And then I get excluded from the group - that could still happen.
(I’m spitballing, I know nothing about anything, just interested bystander)
If you’re interested, you could look it up.
Here’s a quick start.
I genuinely appreciate the shithead responses. Thats how I handle threads a lot of the time too.
Not meant purely as shithead responses. I can’t contribute anything substantial to the discussion but I’m interested, so I’m throwing out random thoughts to bits and pieces and trying not to sound like I consider myself an authority on anything.
You are describing shit head responses.
Yeah, let’s go ask the cavepeople of 30,000 years ago how they handled dangerous industrial jobs in a communist country.
That’s a different topic, isn’t it? I was responding specifically to the notion that a stateless and classless society has never existed.
When was this time when they never existed? A state is just a government and last time I checked anthropology pushed that back to family-ish tribes. Classes are basically tiers and you can see related splits in some family units. I think you’re either going back to monkeys, or romanticising
Both “state” and “class” have specific definitions that were developed at some point. Of course you can find similar structures anywhere living things are coexisting, that doesn’t mean they meet the common conceptions of “state” and “class”.
Agreed. But it sounds like you care about the time before these mechanisms occurred and then my argument is that they have similar mechanisms that trace back further than the specific terms you’re using
Yes, generally outside the context of civilization though. Combining stateless and classless with civilization is the hard part.
I don’t think communism means “everyone gets paid the same regardless of work”.
Also capitalism doesn’t mean that people get paid more or less depending on type of work.
Capitalist means that means of productions are privately owned by capital. While in communism means of production are owned by work.
At least that’s the theory.
I see this definition of communism more lately, but the dictionary definition of communism absolutely does not rewards based on work. It rewards based on need. To the point where money can be abolished altogether. What you describe sounds like socialism, where the distribution of goods is based on contribution, rather than need.
I feel like a lot of discussions surrounding communism have this issue, where people do not have the definition of communism aligned properly. Where did you learn your definition of communism? And where can one read about it? What I have been taught aligns very well with Wikipedia.
a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.
You mean this dictionary definition (Oxford)?
Needs differ, hence compensation differs. The needs of one involved in hazardous work tend to be a bit higher than those involved in baking croissants.
Why would the needs of someone doing more hazardous work be higher? What do they need more food/housing/entertainment/luxury for? I guess more healthcare needs, but I don’t think that is going to convince someone to do the hazardous work.
As soon as you reward because of the hazardous working environment, it is nolonger distribution based on needs of the individual, but based on demand for the job. Rewarding based on supply and demand is capitalistic, not communistic.
Note that I’m no supporter of either (or any) Ideology. I believe we should apply the concepts of different ideologies where they make the most sense. In this case, applying capitalism to attract people into undesirable jobs, makes sense.
Have you done hazardous work? It fucks with your brain.
Alright, so, could you adress my question though? I know that sounds cunty, but, I’m not sure how else to respond.
Why are some people veterinarians? Specialized and low paying for the amount of education needed and debt incurred.
Why are some people firefighters? Dangerous and not particularly high paying.
Your personal motivations don’t represent any society, at large.
Your premise is that people only choose jobs because of the salary? I reject that premise. All information I’m aware of tells us that most people choose jobs because of aptitude, interest, skills and prestige, not because of financial concerns (given that all jobs compensate equally).
It should also be noted that communism doesn’t mean uniform pay. You need to go back to the drawing board and rephrase your question.
Also it’s absurd to suggest that capitalism rewards dangerous jobs more, when it clearly doesn’t. Your example is terrible because power generation is heavily regulated and very safe. The most dangerous jobs are extraction or harvesting jobs, and they can be high paid…but are not well paid in the most dangerous circumstances.
Gonna sit here and tell me my job is very safe, alright bud. I’m beginning to research communism and other forms of rule aside from capitalism, becayse, shit isn’t working for the majority, even though it is for me. I’m starting the journey by asking questions in a community I know is populated by members of said ideology. Seems like a completely reasonable starting point. Recommend me some literature, I genuinely will read it.
You gave me a very specific job title…one that I happen to know is statistically safe. If you have data that proves otherwise, present it.
My job has statistically low deaths because of the amount of training I have and the procedures in place, though it is still 3x high in fatalities than national average. That doesn’t make the 1800 psi steam lines, natural gas lines, high voltage busses, pipe fitting, climbing ladders/pipes fucking safe. Below is a list of associated dangers, people don’t get hurt extremely often because you need a shit load of training to do this. There are also like 40,000 TOTAL power plant operators in the entire United states. Compare that to being an accountant or computer programmer dude. https://www.osha.gov/power-generation/industry-hazards
Your job remains statistically safe for all the reasons you stated. Yes, your job has a very high proportion of fatalities vs injuries…I accounted for that.
I’m not trying to diminish you or your job. I’m just saying you’re paid well, not because it’s dangerous, but rather because you need a lot of expertise to do it and it’s more difficult for your industry to find people that fit the qualifications.
The most dangerous jobs, like the ones I listed earlier, do not tend to pay very well if “danger” is your only metric.
Getting back to the topic, under communism people who work in dangerous or high skilled jobs would be more likely to make more money…not less.
You’re not addressing any of the information I provided. An accountant makes a mistake, they hit backspace and correct it, I make a mistake, I lose a limb, am permanently disfigured or I lose my life… In rare cases I don’t even have to make a mistake, I just have to walk past an undetected steam leak the size of a pinhead. You know what superheated steam does to a human? These are undeniable hazards I have to navigate that the VAST majority of fields do not. But you’re saying because X amount of people dont die every year, my job is safe, thats an insane take.
Why do people do things like rock climbing and other activities that have a high risk of injury or death when mistakes are made without being paid? Some people find dangerous stuff to be more enjoyable than less dangerous stuff.
Most dangerous jobs under capitalism are NOT well paid. People will do dangerous jobs for many reasons, but pay is rarely one of them.
Im speaking from my anecdotal experience of working a dangerous job. I do it 1. Because I genuinely find it interesting 2. Because it pays better than most jobs. If the pay part wasn’t there I’d find something equally interesting in engineering that paid well.
Your job isn’t dangerous. It’s potentially dangerous…but well-regulated and rated as very safe by employment standards.
Resource extraction jobs, for example, are statistically the least safe and tend to not pay well.
3 times higher than national average for fatalities… based on the bureau of labor statistics, but sure, tell me again I have a safe job. You recognize not being the MOST dangerous doesnt make it not dangerous right?
Your job remains statistically safe. Calling it “dangerous” isn’t accurate.
Your argument is like saying flying is more dangerous than other travel because you die more often when there’s an accident.
You’re trolling or genuinely a very stupid person.
My statements are accurate and please miss me with the ad hominem attacks…they’re not a substitute for an argument.
In the US around 30 people a year die from chainsaws. Because that number is small compared to other hazards, chainsaws are safe and not dangerous. This is your argument, do you see that, at all?
Without subversive profit incentives, the incentives become to make necessary-but-undesirable jobs more safe/pleasant/automated. Without worrying about their next paycheque, people can spend time on the issue.
This requires a post-scarcity society that is fairly well developed, before they try to convert to communism.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that capitalism pays dangerous or unpleasant jobs well, though. Some do, but lots don’t.
You get more stuff, more status, etc. Or alternatively, penalized, threatened, etc. Whatever it takes to motivate people to do the job. Even if paper money isn’t a thing in communist societies (which it still is), money’s just a symbol for debt. You’re going to get something, somehow, for a job people greatly desire to be done without enough doers and they’ll become “indebted” to you disproportionately for doing it.
In Soviet society for instance, you might be provided a nice apartment in central Moscow if you were doing something “important”. This assignment would be via your government-controlled employer and their agreements with some other government bureau that officially managed the buildings to dole them out to select people.
So, same deal as anywhere else, just a different mechanism. Higher ration, bigger dacha, jump to the front of the line to get a car, etc.
Compensation is usually not much about how dangerous a job is, though. It’s more about how many people are willing to do it for any number of reasons. Some people are just not very risk-adverse, and figure they’re going to be fine at a job that is more dangerous. And they’ll be compensated at a normal level as long as there are enough such people to fill the need.
the highly dangerous jobs usually are done by red states people: crab fishing in alaska, Oil drilling, fracking, lumber, because the lack of Economy and jobs in thier own state, which is probably on purpose. it all pads the pockets of the elites.
assuming this isnt the case with communist top down RULE, it should be STEM fields, including psychology, environmental conservation, social sciences is a priority.
For advanced STEM degrees, there are people who just enjoy learning that sort of thing and applying their knowledge.
In the same vein, some folks are just attracted to dangerous and difficult jobs because they get a sense of purpose or identity from it.
Others it’s community. I knew a guy who did 20 years active duty military, then joined the national guard, then took a job for the same national guard unit as a DoD civilian and stayed on until they forced him to retire. They had practically drag the guy out. He never did anything but bitch and complain about the work he spent more than 40 years doing, he sounded like kinda hated his job, but he liked being a part of the military.
Same as the incentives under any other economic system: Ambition, adventurousness, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I’ll bring up working in a steel mill again.
So your thinking is that you don’t want to live in a world where people aren’t coerced into doing jobs they hate, because then you personally wouldn’t be coerced into doing the job you hate? Just saying you might consider looking for other work.
I want to live in a world that functions. If nobody does a lot of the jobs I’m talking about, the world ceases to function. I love my job and schedule, but, I wouldn’t engage in the risk associated if I wasn’t compensated at the level I am.
The world as we know it is rapidly approaching the point where it’s going to cease to function. Ecology matters, and climate change is going to wreck the world economy we know and love if war doesn’t wreck it first. Whether hypothetical future better-organized societies should choose to put as much effort into steelmaking as we do seems highly questionable, but it’s up to them.
None. But highly dangerous and specialized fields were always something the creative explored regardless of the ideology.
Pioneers will always exist whether capitalism or communism.
So the creative pioneers are going to work in the steel mills, okay.
Short answer: We don’t know
Longer answer: We hope technology will be fully developed by then to do that stuff for us
One of my favorite answers so far, thank you!
Communism doesn’t mean no money, undesirable labor will always have to be incentivized. I think most people would prefer to be incentivized with the promise of access to luxuries, higher pay, more vacation time, recognized status in the community, rather than the threat of your survival, housing, healthcare, education, etc. You would still have taxes, but critical infrastructure would be owned by the laborers and the state.
Ideally, because there would be no individual ownership of infrastructure or the means of production. So, again ideally, the profits are equitably distributed through labor instead of shareholders. One of the goals of this kind of system would be the elimination of class. Not because people can’t make more money and have more luxuries, but because everyone has the same opportunities. Whereas most of the world today you can just pay for those opportunities.
Now, how exactly do you pull this off? Idk, other than a massive cultural shift. I’m sure someone with a reply telling me what I got wrong will have that answer.
This isn’t entirely accurate. What you described is a ‘socialist’ community, the so-called ‘lower stage of communism’. In this stage, there would still remain incentive based structures for labour. It employs a policy of “from each according to his ability to each according to his works”. Inequality still exists as explained by Marx here:
This equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation… one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another… Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another. — Critique of the Gotha Programme
It is during this lower stage that the transformation of social relations and productive forces gradually alters the motivations for labor to a more virtue-based one.
The problem most communism skeptic people have with communism is that they reason within the current modes of subsistence and assume it is impossible.
“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” — Critique of the Gotha Programme
Marx also stated that he expected us to remain in the lower stage of communism for centuries, but it is during this stage that we prepare the productive forces to sustain communism and start producing goods for their use-value rather than for their exchange value, so that we can achieve the higher stage of communism which employs 'from each according to their ability to each according to his needs. This higher stage is truly classless because we would supposedly have solved scarcity, it would be stateless because people would organize communally to meet their needs, and it would be moneyless because the means of production and means of subsistence would be free for all to access.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor… has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want… only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ — Critique of the Gotha Programme
Most people who specialize do it just for the love of the game.
They are apathetic wether people pay them or not.
I went to school for four years, obtained 7 separate licenses and accrued a decade of experience. I am absolutely not apathetic as to whether or not I get paid.
Granted, but you are not everyone.
Max Planck definitely was not motivated by greed.
I don’t think developing a skill and wanting to be compensated for it is greed. Its just an equitable exchange of goods/services.
Are you suggesting your skill is more valuable than others? If so by which standard? What determines how valuable a skill is?. Or do you think other people don’t develop their skills as well?
I don’t know what you do for a living, but realistically unless you are a farmer your job is not actually essential. People can survive decades without doctors, can police themselves, etc, granted it would be a worse life than currently, but it’s survivable (and I don’t think you’re in either of these positions either, if I were to bet I would say you work in something that’s completely irrelevant to society but that earns money to some rich guy). However everyone needs to eat, so why do you think your skill is more important than the skill of the people actually keeping you alive?.
In my post I list my job. I am a power plant operator. I hold an engineering degree and many specific licenses. A big part of why I make the money I do is because in my job, I am required to run at the danger, secure it and get things working again. If i didn’t people would die, indirectly in the hospital and directly because catastrophic failure and inability to contain it means literal explosions. I run at the thing shooting death out and make it stop, without a laps in electric feed. Look into how dangerous steam is, majority of the steam I work with is 1800 PSI. We keep the lights on at a major hospital and several hundred homes. If the rest of the grid collapsed, we can black start, run as an island and provide a safe haven to thousands. I think the risk I assume, expertise I have and sacrifices I make mean I should earn more than someone who stocks shelves at the grocery store. Ironically, I am also technically a farmer too, but I make almost no money doing that because I have a small operation. I produce and sell honey, lamb meat, eggs, chicken meat and dried beans.
Homie, I’m asking this in all honesty. How many people do you run into on a day to day basis that lists their credentials?
You gotta take a step back and reflect.
I’m not trying to be mean. I want you to be a happier person.
The dude asked what I do and why I feel I deserve compensation… How many comments and threads have I created? I’ve brought it up a few times when it was contextually important. I’m an extremely happy person with close to what is a perfect life for me.
Hospitals and other critical locations have generators, so while blackouts are an inconvenience they rarely cause deaths. They might not be common where you live in part thanks to you, but other parts of the world have blackouts and people are fine. I’m not saying your job is not dangerous or important, but you might be overestimating your importance.
Regardless your job is something that would be considered “essential” on a broader scope, therefore would be highly compensated in any form of communism. During a transitional period it would be highly paid, and if ever money gets abolished it would be recompensated in other ways. On the other hand in capitalism your job is not that highly recompensated, because capitalism pays more for what makes more money regardless of how useful or dangerous it is. For example a quick search tells me that the median salary in the US for your position is 88k, whereas the median salary for a programmer is 133k, and I assure you my job is less dangerous and essential than yours.
That being said, dangerous or undesirable jobs should be automated away, if you think no one would want to be a power plant operator if they could do whatever they want to, then the proper solution is to get rid of the job entirely. No one should be forced to do something they don’t like just so they can pay their bills, we have enough technology to automate at least the dangerous parts of the job, it’s just that under capitalism that money it’s better spent elsewhere because your life is worth approximately 88k per year.
By definition, it kinda is.
You are looking for monetary compensation for a skill you developed.
Edit to add: you are not a greedy person by wanting to survive. Neither are notable scientists completely altruistic. But the most memorable ones that leave a mark are not concerned with surviving. That may be because of their heritage more than their motivation.
Alright.
All the love to you homie.
There’s an argument around anarchist circle that goes like that : thing need to be done, people are not dumb, they’ll do it.
There’s definitely motivation outside of pay. People can value doing jobs that are critical for society knowing that they’re helping
