Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need. I hate doing dishes, but I do them because I hate living without clean dishes even more. Everyone understands sometimes we gotta do stuff we don’t like doing for a greater good. Acting like we need a wageslave class to do menial tasks otherwise we’d just let our world collapse is insulting our collective intelligence. We can share the burden.
That seems kinda too idealistic view of the world.
I know much more people who, if not directly forced, would let the dishes or basically any environment around them completely mould and break down before even considering cleaning up even just the mess they have left behind, than people who altruistically do clean up after themselves and others.
I do agree that living in a cleaner and nicer society should be enough of a motivation and for some it is, but there’s not enough of us.
We can already observe it in many public spaces where trash gets left laying around even if trash cans are available or public bathrooms or showers or my favorite example in the gym where plates get constantly left on the machines and cable attachments just piled up wherever those fell.
I’m not suggesting that we just leave everything to chance and just hope society maintains itself, I’m saying that we can structure society in a way that everything that needs to get done still gets done without the profit motive, because everyone inherently understands that if we evenly and fairly divide up the work that needs to get done, that they’re doing their part to live in a better world - does that make sense?
Yeah it makes sense and I’m not actually that much against the idea. I’m not that fond of the current wage slavery system either.
I just don’t trust general populations altruism that much to believe it would work on a large scale without any sort of a positive Incentivization in addition to just keeping the society running.
I don’t think we need to fully rely on altruism - humans can be selfish and we need to take that into account, and even make use of that tendency for us to want to feather our nests.
I believe that we can create an awesome society based on anarchist principles - freedom, liberty, bottom-up structures, socialized and democratized control of the means of production, and so on. If you’re interested in learning more, I’d recommend the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime, and/or an anarchist FAQ if you’re more of a reader.
Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need.
You might want to read up on the bystander effect. You do the dishes because no-one else is going to do it. But as soon as there are others who can do the job people will just stand around and let other die before they put in the effort.
That’s absolutely not what bystander effect is, not even close. It has also nothing to do with the issue at hand. Bystander effect caused not by not willing to put an effort, it’s incredibly complicated, layered, and not exactly explained, but probably the only thing we know about it for sure is that it’s not because people are lazy
That’s been one of the goals of just about every socio-economic system, but since are not yet at the point where we can completely automate away all undesirable jobs, it all circles back to being shit.
I believe that there’s a way we can fairly share out all the shitty work among everyone, rather than a few at the top who do no work and exploit everyone, and a lot of people at the bottom who do all of the dirty work.
We don’t need to automate everything, we just need a fair system to distribute the work evenly. We have the technology. We can do it. The reason we haven’t is because those in power benefit too much from the current system.
I don’t think I can see a way to actually accomplish that without still ending up with negative outcomes.
Take for example a surgeon, one who is a specialist who’s time is 100% occupied saving people. Does he get taken away from that to do his time as a garbage collector? Do you tell the patient “sorry, you are going to die. You could have been saved, but we needed your surgeon to go pick up garbage.”, or do you have an exemption list?
And if there’s an exemption list, you will never convince me that people wouldn’t start abusing who is and isn’t on that list. You arrive right back to having a class society.
Why would you cancel a surgery to do trash collection? Why not just make it so everyone has one day a week dedicated to chores, for example? We all do our chores at home, right? Why not for the benefit of our communities? The surgery can be scheduled for a day a surgeon is available. I’m sure there would be many surgeons in a world without student debt, enough for them each to spare a few hours mucking in just like everyone else, right?
I’m sure someone has the ability of figuring out some kind of schedule to ensure adequate emergency medical coverage despite medical personnel having other obligations. I know we can do that because we already do it. Surgeons take time off work and people don’t die because of it.
If you schedule that surgeon for garbage duty there won’t always be another surgeon available, so you’re basically telling the patient they have to wait to get surgery because the surgeon is on garbage duty.
Surgeons take time off work and people don’t die because of it.
Actually this does happen. The workload for most surgeons is maxxed out to the point where taking less time off would cause more deaths because of errors due to exhaustion.
Okay, so at worst the system would be as bad as the currently one, but with more surgeons because education would be free, and healthcare would be free, no medical debt, and so on. Do you realize that Cuba has socialized medicine and their health outcomes are far better than the United States? There are cures for lung cancer and alzheimers available in Cuba not available anywhere in the west, despite the US imposed blockade and decades of terrorism by the US?
Do you think the capitalistic system is going to just pay people fairly out of the goodness of the hearts of the ruling class?
How can people be paid the value of their labor while still generating profit? Profit is, by definition, the extraction of surplus labor value. Under capitalism, inherently and definitionally, no member of the working class is ever paid fairly.
No, never even implied that. But in any system we need something that can be exchanged for labor in carrying quantities so we can give more to the people who do the shittiest jobs. Whatever system you come up with, it’s not going to work without money.
If a medium of exchange for labor is indeed necessary, I’d say it should be measured in labor hours. We live finite lives, measured in minutes. A minute of your life is worth as much as a minute of mine, wouldn’t you say?
I would have no inherent problem with a system that tokenizes labor hours in some way. The problem is private ownership of the means of production and profit itself.
ubi, competitive wages, strict caps on profits. there is lots of ways to mitigate capitalism. but basically no way to completely remove it at this point in time.
And all of those reforms will be resisted and then removed by the ruling elite, who control politicians and the media through capitalism. Reform is just short term harm reduction. I agree we are just at the start of our journey to abolish capitalism, but we need to reach our destination, or we will be cursed to forever live through cycles of fascism rising and falling inevitably again and again.
“Who’s gonna do mindbraking soulcrushing jobs for days without a break?” Nobody, that’s not a job that has to be done this way. “But if we stop orphan crushing machine, what will crush all the orphans?”
When you’re imagining the worst parts of the worst jobs, remember that the reason those jobs have worst parts is because the main incentive of every job is to have the profit of a job as high as possible, and to exploit the workers. Yeah, some jobs are hard, some are complicated, some are dirty, some are all three. But all that is something people can and regularly enjoy. People don’t enjoy when it’s degrading, when it’s soulcrushing for no reason, when there is obvious injustice. And it has nothing to do with jobs
Some things require years of specialization and simply can’t be done by novices. You don’t want volunteer engineers, pharmacists, etc. Some of those specializations are also unpleasant. We need to support people and not require that all humanity be profitable, but we also need to incentivize people to do shitty and/or difficult jobs. That balance is extremely difficult to find, and the most effective solution we’ve found is paying people for that work. There’s an incredible imbalance in our system right now that values non-productive ownership over all else, but the solution to that isn’t saying “Fuck it - nobody gets paid and it’ll all work itself out.”
The easiest solution is to tax the shit out of the uber-wealthy. Right now we have lower classes defined by income and an upper class defined by wealth. If we remove the wealth and make work and productivity more valuable than ownership, it moves us much closer to equity.
Someone who wants to live a life of luxury and comfort in a world with wastewater treatment plants, knowing that everyone else is also pitching in and doing their part.
Someone who wants to live in a world without billionaire pedophiles in power doing nothing but hoarding all of the wealth and abusing women and children.
Someone who cares about the wellbeing of their community and is motivated by that, rather than by selfish greed.
Everyone can’t do everything, and some specialized jobs with specialized skills are extremely unpleasant. Are you suggesting that we just hope things get done, or that we force people to do it while giving nothing in return.
I’m suggesting that we can come up with a better system than the current one we have. I have ideas for how we could do that, and if you’re interested you can check out an anarchist FAQ for a wide variety of ideas, but I don’t have all the answers, no one does. We can only reach a system which works for everyone by first acknowledging our current system is deeply flawed, then coming together to work to build a better alternative.
These are all real things. A better world is possible. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but remember that incredible changes that would have seemed impossible have happened before and will happen again.
If you told a pioneer in the Virginia company back in 1607 that black women would be given rights and the abililty to vote to elect their leaders, they’d probably burn you as a witch.
It sounds like you have never come across the concept of the tragedy of the commons?
The particular topic of waste disposal is a good one because we have good historical accounts of the transition from a free-for-all to regulated, paid profession. Take the example of Paris, which in the 17th century was infamous for its dirt and stink. Repeated efforts to force people to keep their own streets clean failed, and ultimately residents complained that if the King wanted the streets to be clean, he had better pay for someone to come and clean them. Eventually city officials managed to force (through threat of punishment) residents to sweep waste and mud into the middle of the streets, and pay people to come through and collect and remove it.
In 15th century Britain, nightmen removed waste from cess-pits and charged two shillings a ton. If there were enough people who just loved shoveling shit so much to do this without money changing hands, why weren’t they out doing that?
I’m actually very familiar with the idea of the tragedy of the commons.
Rather than re-cover well tread ground, I hope that you don’t mind if I quote from a relevant section of an Anarchist FAQ, and I encourage you to check the link I shared, as it goes into far more detail:
In reality, the “tragedy of the commons” comes about only after wealth and private property, backed by the state, starts to eat into and destroy communal life. This is well indicated by the fact that commons existed for thousands of years and only disappeared after the rise of capitalism – and the powerful central state it requires – had eroded communal values and traditions. Without the influence of wealth concentrations and the state, people get together and come to agreements over how to use communal resources and have been doing so for millennia. That was how the commons were successfully managed before the wealthy sought to increase their holdings and deny the poor access to land in order to make them fully dependent on the power and whims of the owning class.
[…]
In fact, communal ownership produces a strong incentive to protect such resources for people are aware that their offspring will need them and so be inclined to look after them. By having more resources available, they would be able to resist the pressures of short-termism and so resist maximising current production without regard for the future. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive… unless they maximise short-term profits then they will not be around in the long-term (so if wood means more profits than centuries-old forests then the trees will be chopped down). By combining common ownership with decentralised and federated communal self-management, anarchism will be more than able to manage resources effectively, avoiding the pitfalls of both privatisation and nationalisation.
If you want a modern, real-world example of this which you may have actually experienced yourself, look no further than this medium we are using to communicate. The Internet is a great example. The Internet was a fantastic common space lovingly maintained and curated by individuals, with services and content provided freely. Corporations encircled it, and turned it into the torment nexus we have today. It wasn’t because of us, collectively, that spoiled the commons of the Internet - it was capitalism itself.
I feel like that entire passage completely ignores the fact that last time the bulk of humanity lived a communal lifestyle, the number of humans on the planet was a few orders of magnitude smaller. It’s a fairly easy setup to maintain when settlements are small and the bulk of people’s time is spent as hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers. As soon as you put a very large number of people into a city, the communal arrangement falls apart. And many people like living in cities. That genie is out of the bottle, and people are not going to be willing to go back to being a subsistence farmer in a commune.
I don’t see why we would need to give up modern agriculture, fertilizer, heavy machinery, or automation in order to abolish capitalism, can you explain why you feel that way?
There are many things that people are willing to do for their own satisfaction, I don’t disagree with that. I don’t think waste disposal is one of them.
The “communal life” you’re talking about cannot exist in an urbanised society, because most people you affect in a city are not personally known to you, and there will be no opportunity for the social mechanisms we evolved to pressure us into doing the right thing. In a village of 200 people, if you throw your shit in the street, your neighbour, whom you know personally and whose opinion you likely care about, will complain. In a city of 2 million, if someone throws shit in the street you have no idea who it was, they’ve never met you, and what are you gonna do about it anyway?
Anyway, I should bow out now. I have no interest in discussing politics or economics with an anarchist.
because most people you affect in a city are not personally known to you, and there will be no opportunity for the social mechanisms we evolved to pressure us into doing the right thing
That’s a demonstrable bullshit. Believing that the only motivation people can have is the fear of repercussions is the same level of that christian psychotic “if it wasn’t for the fear of god everyone would be raping and killing all the time” that says more about you than about supposed issue you’re afraid of.
It’s not fear of repercussions; it’s social glue. Crime is much more common in cities, out of proportion with how many people there are, because people who are willing to commit crime are not willing to commit it against people they know personally. Urbanisation allows depersonalisation allows bad behaviour.
It also allows effects to be transmitted that are simply way less direct than you have any hope of instinct being able to reckon with. Like, you can work out that tossing shit out of your window will piss off your neighbour, but the knock-on-effects of what you do can be harder to figure out than that. Did you buy a little bit more of anything at the start of COVID, “just in case”?
Do you really believe everyone would act like a psychopath if they aren’t always directly accountable for their actions? And how does that differ from our current system?
I have no interest in discussing politics or economics with an anarchist.
That’s really too bad, because I’m sure you’d learn a lot! Anarchism is not what you think it is. Either way, have a great day, I wish you all the best. Solidarity forever!
Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need. I hate doing dishes, but I do them because I hate living without clean dishes even more. Everyone understands sometimes we gotta do stuff we don’t like doing for a greater good. Acting like we need a wageslave class to do menial tasks otherwise we’d just let our world collapse is insulting our collective intelligence. We can share the burden.
That seems kinda too idealistic view of the world.
I know much more people who, if not directly forced, would let the dishes or basically any environment around them completely mould and break down before even considering cleaning up even just the mess they have left behind, than people who altruistically do clean up after themselves and others.
I do agree that living in a cleaner and nicer society should be enough of a motivation and for some it is, but there’s not enough of us.
We can already observe it in many public spaces where trash gets left laying around even if trash cans are available or public bathrooms or showers or my favorite example in the gym where plates get constantly left on the machines and cable attachments just piled up wherever those fell.
I’m not suggesting that we just leave everything to chance and just hope society maintains itself, I’m saying that we can structure society in a way that everything that needs to get done still gets done without the profit motive, because everyone inherently understands that if we evenly and fairly divide up the work that needs to get done, that they’re doing their part to live in a better world - does that make sense?
Yeah it makes sense and I’m not actually that much against the idea. I’m not that fond of the current wage slavery system either.
I just don’t trust general populations altruism that much to believe it would work on a large scale without any sort of a positive Incentivization in addition to just keeping the society running.
I don’t think we need to fully rely on altruism - humans can be selfish and we need to take that into account, and even make use of that tendency for us to want to feather our nests.
I believe that we can create an awesome society based on anarchist principles - freedom, liberty, bottom-up structures, socialized and democratized control of the means of production, and so on. If you’re interested in learning more, I’d recommend the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime, and/or an anarchist FAQ if you’re more of a reader.
You might want to read up on the bystander effect. You do the dishes because no-one else is going to do it. But as soon as there are others who can do the job people will just stand around and let other die before they put in the effort.
That’s absolutely not what bystander effect is, not even close. It has also nothing to do with the issue at hand. Bystander effect caused not by not willing to put an effort, it’s incredibly complicated, layered, and not exactly explained, but probably the only thing we know about it for sure is that it’s not because people are lazy
Don’t you think there is some way we could structure society to counteract that without creating an underclass of wage slavery?
That’s been one of the goals of just about every socio-economic system, but since are not yet at the point where we can completely automate away all undesirable jobs, it all circles back to being shit.
I believe that there’s a way we can fairly share out all the shitty work among everyone, rather than a few at the top who do no work and exploit everyone, and a lot of people at the bottom who do all of the dirty work.
We don’t need to automate everything, we just need a fair system to distribute the work evenly. We have the technology. We can do it. The reason we haven’t is because those in power benefit too much from the current system.
I don’t think I can see a way to actually accomplish that without still ending up with negative outcomes.
Take for example a surgeon, one who is a specialist who’s time is 100% occupied saving people. Does he get taken away from that to do his time as a garbage collector? Do you tell the patient “sorry, you are going to die. You could have been saved, but we needed your surgeon to go pick up garbage.”, or do you have an exemption list?
And if there’s an exemption list, you will never convince me that people wouldn’t start abusing who is and isn’t on that list. You arrive right back to having a class society.
Why would you cancel a surgery to do trash collection? Why not just make it so everyone has one day a week dedicated to chores, for example? We all do our chores at home, right? Why not for the benefit of our communities? The surgery can be scheduled for a day a surgeon is available. I’m sure there would be many surgeons in a world without student debt, enough for them each to spare a few hours mucking in just like everyone else, right?
I’m sure someone has the ability of figuring out some kind of schedule to ensure adequate emergency medical coverage despite medical personnel having other obligations. I know we can do that because we already do it. Surgeons take time off work and people don’t die because of it.
If you schedule that surgeon for garbage duty there won’t always be another surgeon available, so you’re basically telling the patient they have to wait to get surgery because the surgeon is on garbage duty.
Actually this does happen. The workload for most surgeons is maxxed out to the point where taking less time off would cause more deaths because of errors due to exhaustion.
Okay, so at worst the system would be as bad as the currently one, but with more surgeons because education would be free, and healthcare would be free, no medical debt, and so on. Do you realize that Cuba has socialized medicine and their health outcomes are far better than the United States? There are cures for lung cancer and alzheimers available in Cuba not available anywhere in the west, despite the US imposed blockade and decades of terrorism by the US?
Yes, paying more for the shitty jobs.
Do you think the capitalistic system is going to just pay people fairly out of the goodness of the hearts of the ruling class?
How can people be paid the value of their labor while still generating profit? Profit is, by definition, the extraction of surplus labor value. Under capitalism, inherently and definitionally, no member of the working class is ever paid fairly.
No, never even implied that. But in any system we need something that can be exchanged for labor in carrying quantities so we can give more to the people who do the shittiest jobs. Whatever system you come up with, it’s not going to work without money.
If a medium of exchange for labor is indeed necessary, I’d say it should be measured in labor hours. We live finite lives, measured in minutes. A minute of your life is worth as much as a minute of mine, wouldn’t you say?
I would have no inherent problem with a system that tokenizes labor hours in some way. The problem is private ownership of the means of production and profit itself.
ubi, competitive wages, strict caps on profits. there is lots of ways to mitigate capitalism. but basically no way to completely remove it at this point in time.
And all of those reforms will be resisted and then removed by the ruling elite, who control politicians and the media through capitalism. Reform is just short term harm reduction. I agree we are just at the start of our journey to abolish capitalism, but we need to reach our destination, or we will be cursed to forever live through cycles of fascism rising and falling inevitably again and again.
Sure is a good thing doing this dishes is the most complicated and least-pleasant thing people can do…
Who’s gonna volunteer to go through years of training specializing in commercial diving in wastewater to treatment plants for free?
“Who’s gonna do mindbraking soulcrushing jobs for days without a break?” Nobody, that’s not a job that has to be done this way. “But if we stop orphan crushing machine, what will crush all the orphans?”
When you’re imagining the worst parts of the worst jobs, remember that the reason those jobs have worst parts is because the main incentive of every job is to have the profit of a job as high as possible, and to exploit the workers. Yeah, some jobs are hard, some are complicated, some are dirty, some are all three. But all that is something people can and regularly enjoy. People don’t enjoy when it’s degrading, when it’s soulcrushing for no reason, when there is obvious injustice. And it has nothing to do with jobs
Some things require years of specialization and simply can’t be done by novices. You don’t want volunteer engineers, pharmacists, etc. Some of those specializations are also unpleasant. We need to support people and not require that all humanity be profitable, but we also need to incentivize people to do shitty and/or difficult jobs. That balance is extremely difficult to find, and the most effective solution we’ve found is paying people for that work. There’s an incredible imbalance in our system right now that values non-productive ownership over all else, but the solution to that isn’t saying “Fuck it - nobody gets paid and it’ll all work itself out.”
The easiest solution is to tax the shit out of the uber-wealthy. Right now we have lower classes defined by income and an upper class defined by wealth. If we remove the wealth and make work and productivity more valuable than ownership, it moves us much closer to equity.
Someone who wants to live a life of luxury and comfort in a world with wastewater treatment plants, knowing that everyone else is also pitching in and doing their part.
Someone who wants to live in a world without billionaire pedophiles in power doing nothing but hoarding all of the wealth and abusing women and children.
Someone who cares about the wellbeing of their community and is motivated by that, rather than by selfish greed.
In other words, anyone. Everyone.
Everyone can’t do everything, and some specialized jobs with specialized skills are extremely unpleasant. Are you suggesting that we just hope things get done, or that we force people to do it while giving nothing in return.
One is delusional - the other is just slavery.
I’m suggesting that we can come up with a better system than the current one we have. I have ideas for how we could do that, and if you’re interested you can check out an anarchist FAQ for a wide variety of ideas, but I don’t have all the answers, no one does. We can only reach a system which works for everyone by first acknowledging our current system is deeply flawed, then coming together to work to build a better alternative.
This is idealistic to the point of parody.
These are all real things. A better world is possible. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but remember that incredible changes that would have seemed impossible have happened before and will happen again.
If you told a pioneer in the Virginia company back in 1607 that black women would be given rights and the abililty to vote to elect their leaders, they’d probably burn you as a witch.
It sounds like you have never come across the concept of the tragedy of the commons?
The particular topic of waste disposal is a good one because we have good historical accounts of the transition from a free-for-all to regulated, paid profession. Take the example of Paris, which in the 17th century was infamous for its dirt and stink. Repeated efforts to force people to keep their own streets clean failed, and ultimately residents complained that if the King wanted the streets to be clean, he had better pay for someone to come and clean them. Eventually city officials managed to force (through threat of punishment) residents to sweep waste and mud into the middle of the streets, and pay people to come through and collect and remove it.
In 15th century Britain, nightmen removed waste from cess-pits and charged two shillings a ton. If there were enough people who just loved shoveling shit so much to do this without money changing hands, why weren’t they out doing that?
I’m actually very familiar with the idea of the tragedy of the commons.
Rather than re-cover well tread ground, I hope that you don’t mind if I quote from a relevant section of an Anarchist FAQ, and I encourage you to check the link I shared, as it goes into far more detail:
If you want a modern, real-world example of this which you may have actually experienced yourself, look no further than this medium we are using to communicate. The Internet is a great example. The Internet was a fantastic common space lovingly maintained and curated by individuals, with services and content provided freely. Corporations encircled it, and turned it into the torment nexus we have today. It wasn’t because of us, collectively, that spoiled the commons of the Internet - it was capitalism itself.
I feel like that entire passage completely ignores the fact that last time the bulk of humanity lived a communal lifestyle, the number of humans on the planet was a few orders of magnitude smaller. It’s a fairly easy setup to maintain when settlements are small and the bulk of people’s time is spent as hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers. As soon as you put a very large number of people into a city, the communal arrangement falls apart. And many people like living in cities. That genie is out of the bottle, and people are not going to be willing to go back to being a subsistence farmer in a commune.
I don’t see why we would need to give up modern agriculture, fertilizer, heavy machinery, or automation in order to abolish capitalism, can you explain why you feel that way?
There are many things that people are willing to do for their own satisfaction, I don’t disagree with that. I don’t think waste disposal is one of them.
The “communal life” you’re talking about cannot exist in an urbanised society, because most people you affect in a city are not personally known to you, and there will be no opportunity for the social mechanisms we evolved to pressure us into doing the right thing. In a village of 200 people, if you throw your shit in the street, your neighbour, whom you know personally and whose opinion you likely care about, will complain. In a city of 2 million, if someone throws shit in the street you have no idea who it was, they’ve never met you, and what are you gonna do about it anyway?
Anyway, I should bow out now. I have no interest in discussing politics or economics with an anarchist.
That’s a demonstrable bullshit. Believing that the only motivation people can have is the fear of repercussions is the same level of that christian psychotic “if it wasn’t for the fear of god everyone would be raping and killing all the time” that says more about you than about supposed issue you’re afraid of.
It’s not fear of repercussions; it’s social glue. Crime is much more common in cities, out of proportion with how many people there are, because people who are willing to commit crime are not willing to commit it against people they know personally. Urbanisation allows depersonalisation allows bad behaviour.
It also allows effects to be transmitted that are simply way less direct than you have any hope of instinct being able to reckon with. Like, you can work out that tossing shit out of your window will piss off your neighbour, but the knock-on-effects of what you do can be harder to figure out than that. Did you buy a little bit more of anything at the start of COVID, “just in case”?
Do you really believe everyone would act like a psychopath if they aren’t always directly accountable for their actions? And how does that differ from our current system?
That’s really too bad, because I’m sure you’d learn a lot! Anarchism is not what you think it is. Either way, have a great day, I wish you all the best. Solidarity forever!
No.