Comment by crabbone
2 days ago
There are, without a doubt, a lot of jobs nobody wants to work. Not sure anyone wants to clean restrooms in fast food establishments, for example.
So, if we allow people to choose their jobs and don't have any mechanism that weeds out people who aren't good at what they chose to do, no incentive to work jobs nobody wants to do... we'll probably starve before the we die of lack of sanitation.
Communism had this core ethical belief that everyone should contribute as according to their ability and should be served according to their needs. I'm not sure if Marx believed this to be possible in the physical universe, or was it something that we should approach as much as possible given the constraints of the physical universe. But, countries pursuing communism so far all ran into the problem with lack of motivation, corruption and the need to build a police state in an attempt to counter the two.
So... maybe basic income isn't such a bad idea in the world where ambition can be more rewarding, but I still don't know who's going to work "bad" jobs if the alternative is to live off the basic income.
Technology is the answer. Automate as many of the "bad" jobs as possible and for those we can't, find some additional incentive structure to reward those who do them. I'm not calling for complete elimination of incentive structures, but I do think we can work off an equitable baseline today. Keep incentives around as a bonus —everyone has their basic material needs accounted for, you want to live a little better than your neighbor? Work this job that we cannot fully automate yet and that is unpleasant. If all the arguments from human nature and about behavioral tendencies that people use against "communism" are valid, this sort of approach will work and should offset any concerns people have about "who will do the dead end jobs if we don't effectively force people to do them to survive?" (by the way, I hope it's not lost on anyone how perverse that is—the argument for capital is effectively the argument that the only way to have humans do dirty work is to impose scarcity and artificially withhold their means of subsistence to force them to do so)
Our technological capabilities vastly outpace those of even just a few decades ago. Communism did not fail because of "human nature" or some other nonsense boogeyman people want to set up as a straw man, it failed for the simpler reason that we did not have sufficient mastery of material or recourse to automations. Today, that is no longer the case and what is actually holding us back are faulty arguments based on the existence of ghosts like "invisible hands" or "universal human nature".
I was born and lived in USSR for quite a while... life wasn't pleasant there, and technology was not the culprit really. They ran out of carrots a very long time ago, and were left with just the stick to try and enforce the ethics advocated by the communist program.
There was a joke that I didn't quite understand at the time:
The idea was to say that in order to optimize almost every aspect of industry, everything was centralized, gigantic... which also created a situation where most people could only see a very tiny fraction of what they were working on. Virtually nobody knew what their individual effort contributed to the whole. And in this situation, say, you come to the factory and during your shift you cut a thousand of bolts... or ten thousands... or just ten. The system is too big to adequately respond to your individual input. You just don't know whether your extra bolts were smelted again to make more nuts, or whether some other department in your factory was sitting on their hands waiting for more bolts to come.
People who enjoyed their work usually worked outside, or even against the establishment because the system couldn't provide them with adequate reward, not even in a form of recognition.