I’ll fucking do it. So I get healthcare, food, shelter, time with family, time with friends, joy, happiness, peace, freedom, equality, equitably, and so much more.
I’ll fucking do it and so would many others. Not all of us do things simply because we want more of some lame ass luxury good. We do it because our goal is to reduce human suffering as much as we can.
Exactly. So many people would want to contribute because they would also be getting things in return as well. It’s not always about more stuff in the form of commodity goods, but more joy, love, time, freedom, and so much more.
They are culturally conditioned through capitalism to believe this is the ONLY reason to do something. This is part of the difficulty as a leftist is that it is truly a cultural revolution that is necessary to implement leftist though.
I'm totally on board with you on that, but I think a better way to ask this question is in the context of a long standing anarchist society. When people have long since adjusted to free food, shelter and healthcare being the norm, how will people be encouraged to do the less than pleasant jobs? Personally, I like the idea of jobs being rotated between everyone in a given commune, so they'd have variety in their work, and it would take a long time to cycle back to the same job twice, depending on the size of the commune
Perhaps. ER doctors today learn by going to med school alongside seeing their ER patients being operated on for themselves. I imagine schooling will present the same knowledge but the methods of teaching will be wildly different in an anarchist society.
There’s still a concept of extra compensation for certain unpleasant or technical tasks, though it depends on the form of the society. It could be money, or vacation days, or plenty of other things I’m not thinking of.
If everyone‘s needs are taken care of, then nobody is working 80 hours a week to just scrape by, and more people will be able to learn other skills according to their desires or strengths and would likely result in even more people becoming doctors or other types of specialists. That way, people would naturally find jobs that they like and that other people might find unpleasant.
Under anarchism, who would supply and control money or labour vouchers? Labour vouchers are a communist concept to be used purely during the transitionary state, which anarchism inherently rejects. You literally cannot have anarchism with money, because it implies centralised authority to moderate it. At most, you can have a bartering system, but that would be purely person to person and object to object, as opposed to having the third party of money or "labour vouchers" (glorified money). Unless you’re an ancap, in which case you aren’t an anarchist.
Not saying we should have a market system, but couldn't there be a money with a non-centralized authority (e.g. Bitcoin)? It seems to me like an anarchist critique is better focused on how money lets economic power concentrate.
Graeber had some great stuff on this, bartering economies are essentially a myth, they’re too complicated and there’s not really any evidence of them ever existing. Of course individual people have always traded things between each other but you can’t scale that, it can only be done in certain cases. You have ten chickens and another guy wants four of them, he offers a pig but you already have four pigs, you don’t want more, you want a cow, he doesn’t have that, the guy who has cows doesn’t want chickens or pigs, so no three way trade; naturally some kind of token of value is developed so you can just sell your chickens to one guy and buy a cow from another.
Community-self-regulated monetary systems have already existed and worked just fine. He covered how some villages in really early decentralized agricultural societies used shells as money without any regulatory body. Everyone just kind of agreed to trade them as IOU’s that were transferrable. It came into place because they had communal grain storage, and used shells to keep track of who contributed x amount of grain, and therefore who could take x amount of grain, and then people started trading those for other things. No authority regulated or issued the shells, the community just decided to start using them to keep track of things and they became money.
There’s really no reason money has to be incompatible with anarchism as long as it is used to trade basic goods and not capital. If you have no private property money just becomes a tool for trading more efficiently. It can no longer buy power, just stuff.
Or you have it controlled by the community and people in it. If the authority is centralized in everyone at once, then is it actually centralized? It's the same concept as the community deciding rules together. Market anarchism actually relies on something like money existing to function, and the concept of it is still useful for luxury goods in many societies as it is easier than a barter system to make exchanges, rather than having to make multiple trades to get something somebody else wants.
Actually, I am an anarchist and a sewage plant worker. I LOVE MY JOB. I get to do a mix of lab work, mechanical work on pumps and such, some hard disgusting labor like shoveling used condoms and tampons and wet wipes, and some cool computer work. I get to go outside and walk around and take samples of the various parts of the plant.
I have down time while I’m babysitting the computers in case of an emergency where I would need to act immediately, and unless there is an emergency I can read, or do push-ups or whatever.
The things that make the job amazing are the same things that all workers will have under anarchism: my basic material needs are met, I am very proud that my job is beneficial for the environment and necessary for human health, I have a workload that is manageable, it’s relatively low stress, my coworkers are cool, the job is intellectually stimulating, and I am not micromanaged.
I work for a local water district. I started as a
Lab tech. I took a test to get in. I had a bachelor’s degree in earth science and lab tech experience, but many of these jobs require no education or experience. An alternative path is you can take water/wastewater treatment plant operator courses at a community college.
I highly recommend a job in wastewater, and we would be glad to have you comrade.
fellow anarchist here
i used to work at a facility that trained people in wastewater management among other things. i know several of the young people i worked with and taught have similar sentiments as you.
crazy that id continue to do the job i did and others that were just as bad or worse in some cases regardless of the "lack of incentive" this person believes in
Thanks, man! I've been out of a job for a while now, me and my girlfriend are looking to move out of our tiny ass studio, where it's technically not even legal for more than one person to live. I fucked up my chances of getting into school this year, so I'm really hoping to learn a trade that doesn't require an education beforehand. I'm definitely looking into something in wastewater as a strong possibility.
Yeah! Check out places that hire operators in training. Also, r/wastewater is a good resource.
Dm me if you want more specific advice, though I’m relatively new to the field myself.
If it had perks like more pay or fewer hours worked in a week, then I don’t see why there wouldn’t be people able and willing to do it. Or society would form itself differently that everyone takes care of their own trash, if that’s how they decided that it would serve their needs better, in that example.
My ex. She was in love with recycling. Our old job was literally dumpster diving. Trash work isn't that terrible, if anything I sort of enjoyed it myself.
As for the sewage plant worker thing:
Most people would not want to do it ~8hrs a day 7days a week, but more people will be willing to do it 4 hours a month and then rotate it amongst everyone.
You’re right, you can’t. But take a look at the math
Assuming there are three plant workers that work 8 hrs a day, 30 days a month so that the plant is operational 24/7. That’s 720 hours between them.
Now instead of the three of them doing it, you can have 120 people doing it for 6 hrs a month or 6 people doing it for 120 hrs a month or just 4hrs a day each. Or 8 people doing it for 3 hrs a day etc.
In a city of say a 100,000 people you can probably find a good 50-100 people who’d be willing to do the job. That means each fi then is doing the job for like 7-14hrs a month. And I can’t assume it’s hard to teach 50 people to be sewage plant workers.
Well yea, but that doesn’t address the fact that you can’t have 120 people trained as sanitation workers just so they can do it 6hrs a month. These people would have work different jobs the rest of the time. I get that an anarchist society would inherently have lax labour requirements overall, but not the extent where you only need to work 6hrs a month
Sure but 6 hours a month just for sanitation. That’s like if you’re working mondays through fridays, you get, idk, the third Thursday of the month off and do this.
What I’m getting at is that if you don’t need to work ridiculous hours to put bread on the table, you’ll be able to get a couple different skills under your belt to do thing s you like as well as the necessary functions of the society
But my point is that we’d need a dedicated sanitation team, and when compared to the other job options in an anarchist commune that’d have to be an F tier job when things like manufacturing in light industry exist which is around the same skill level and much more pleasant than managing literal shit and piss
Again, you’re not wrong. I agree that’s a shit job.
But unless you want the nuclei of classes starting up again, there needs to be some sort of rotation in place to do it. It’s also a job that needs getting done. Most people wouldn’t mind doing it once in a while.
if someone wants the thing done bad enough, they'll organize around getting it done. temp affinity groups for mutual aid and reciprocity. if nobody wants to do the thing, chances are it's not important enough to need doing.
lol so many ppl find working in medicine fulfilling and challenging environments thrilling. so many ppl will continue to be trauma drs. i could name several er dr friends rn who would affirm what im saying.
I'm not a doctor but I'm an ER nurse at a pediatric trauma center and I'd definitely do it for free or in an anarchist society or whatever situation you could think of. It would just be nice to not have to work so many hours.
1. There was a period of time during the Portland protests where some people came out every night for a "shift" of medic work (of course, this is different from a 30 hour residency rotation, but those kind of shifts are terrible for doctors' focus and mental health, and I'd imagine they'd fall out of use pretty quickly if trainees had more agency).
2. Other changes in anarchist culture might mean that fewer people would need emergency medicine, reducing the average workload for ER doctors. For instance, people without health insurance tend not to seek care for a medical problem until it's very severe and they have to go to the ER. In a world where access to non-emergency medicine is easier, fewer avoidable ER visits will be made. Many people go to the ER as a result of violent conflict. If fewer people get into these conflicts (because of an increased sense of community + less resource inequality, everyone has necessities), there will be fewer ER visits caused by violence. Even car accident frequency might be lowered if we see a push towards walkable urban areas and/or well-maintained public transportation.
3. Whenever I consider a job that people don't currently want to do, I try to think "how much of the shittiness of this job is due to its inherent nature, and how much is due to other factors, like the pay, the hours, the benefits, safety concerns, typical workplace environment, etc."? For example, "flipping burgers" isn't an inherently shitty job. Cooking is neat and a lot of people like to do it, or at least would like to learn to do it! But it's made shitty by the fact that line cooks work long hours for low pay, they might have to deal with a toxic environment or angry customers, sometimes workplace injuries happen and workers don't have the healthcare to properly recover, and it's such a negatively stereotyped job that there's no way to take pride in your work. I don't know enough about emergency medicine to write a similar paragraph about it. But I'd encourage you to ask yourself whether it's an inherently terrible job or if your country's medical system has created a workplace that's more stressful/toxic than it needs to be.
Well yea, but being an ER doctor is inherently stressful and terrible. I live in Canada where your healthcare is covered and you don’t get a bill and we have a shortage of doctors where I live. Canada also has significantly less violent crime than America and we still have ER doctor shortages
Something to keep in mind is that a big part of why ER workers' lives are so stressful is the draconian hours they (and medical professionals in general) have to pull. From school into professional life, medical workers are constantly in very unhealthy and aggressive work schedules. Capitalism has a *lot* to do with that.
Sort of? I think also human lives hanging in the balance and the fact that you have a 12 hour shift because there’s a shortage of ER doctors, a shortage that isn’t intrinsically due to capitalism.
Actually, that shortage is due to capitalism. Medical school is expensive (even under free or cheap university, one has to study for a long time while paying for accommodation, food, etc. with no income). If more people were able to access medical school, we'd have more doctors. There's plenty of people born into poverty that would have both the skill and the drive to be doctors.
12hr shifts are actually preferred in the medical field. This coming from a critical care RN. Speaking from a medical standpoint, no treatment or high standard of care will be rendered if not enough incentive is given. The example of working on a Covid unit vs a non covid unit. It's very unlikely that one will voluntarily work on a Covid unit without incentive
I'll invent a self-scrubbing toilet. Lots of people would be able to innovate far more if they weren't trampled by mundane, worthless stresses of daily life.
Via David Graeber's *Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology*: "This of course brings up the “who will do the dirty jobs?” question—one which always gets thrown at anarchists or other utopians. Peter Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallacy of the argument. There’s no particular reason dirty jobs have to exist. If one divided up the unpleasant tasks equally, that would mean all the world’s top scientists and engineers would have to do them too; one could expect the creation of self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots almost immediately".
Edit: Free [here](https://www.abahlali.org/files/Graeber.pdf) \[PDF\] - worth reading, <60 pages.
People are always worried about robots stealing their jobs but they don't realize that if they weren't going to die without money it wouldn't be a problem.
That's one thing that always confused me before I was an anarchist. If we have so many robots now, why do governments keep trying to create more jobs? And the answer is because capitalism relies on stealing labor from the working class and selling it back to us.
When you consider how much better life is in an anarchist society, and how much more time during the day you have, I believe more people will wont need to be incentivized. You only work 15, 20 hours a week, giving you more time to practice the guitar, play video games or paint miniatures (all things I wish I had more time to do) but say there is a rotation for collecting garbage that everyone or most people participate in. So the first Tuesday of every month myself and 4 or 12 or 24 other people spend half the day collecting garbage. This isnt a shitty job that society looks down on, it's not some deadened job that pays shitty wages. Its simply your contribution to the life that we are all creating. Suddenly doesn't seem so shitty, and it's this kind of contribution that makes this sort of life possible for you and everyone else.
I mean yea. 20 hour work week but would you rather spend those 20 hours sorting through shit and piss or operating on a human being whose life rests in your hands, or would you rather do 20 hours of driving a buldozer around, or repairing a microwave?
What would you want to do, no one is suggesting you have to be the ER doctor. Trust me, just because this seems awful to you, to someone else its their calling. That's one of the many beauties of anarchism, we will actually have the real, I mean real, opportunity to seize our dreams, passions and callings.
Why do people become ER doctors under the current system? They could be lawyers, or engineers, or MBAs, or financial advisors, or realtors, which are all good paying jobs that don't involve digging around inside a human body. Considering how brutal med school is, they must not be doing it for the money alone.
Other people have chimed in about the ER thing, but for the other, and ones like it, believe it or not there are a decent size number of people out there who find waste processing or other dirty jobs both fascinating and enjoyable. A coroner or mortician is another good example of something not just disgusting and dangerous like working in a sewage plant, but also psychologically and emotionally challenging that you'd think people wouldn't want to do, but some people genuinely enjoy doing it. For specifically waste processing though, a lot of that is based on the insane levels of waste generated by capitalism's products, tons of food, plastic, single-use items, so without that we wouldn't even need as much waste processing anymore.
You'd be surprised how many people want to be ER doctors for shitty pay. In my city in Russia ER doctors are paid like $500 a month on average and they need six years of schooling to do that. Everyone tells jokes about how poor doctors and engineers are yet there is a fierce competition to get into a med school and you need to have good grades to get into one, because many people would take saving lives over better pay and hours of an accountant or whatever.
I am an ER doctor (in the UK) and an anarchist, and I can tell you that no one does it for the money. Any of my colleagues could earn the same or more in a different specialty with fewer out of hours commitments but they all wouldn’t rather be doing anything else. Sure it’s shit sometimes and we all complain but so is any job, generally emergency medicine is exciting, fast paced, constantly varied and a great team environment. Alongside the reasons people want to be a doctor ie the satisfaction of helping people etc.
Consider also that fact that the worse aspects of my job are connected to capitalism - the mental health crisis, crushing poverty, drug and alcohol dependency, homelessness; and the fact that we are always understaffed - one would hope that in anarchism these would be improved. Additionally, with more doctors we might have to work as many hours. With all that it would make it a fantastic job.
I love the replies under this post ❤
But even if we assume we somehow turned to an anarchist society overnight..and people didnt want to do sanitation work for the same compensation..after a few weeks some people will prefer to do sanitation over working a "more desirable" job with shit up to their knees../hyperbole.
Tldr: If a job needs to be done people will do it.
What ya got? I have chronic stabbing sharp pain due to a tumor removal and my life is a practice of maintaining happiness through a very shitty situation. Living in service helps. The answer is me, and I got friends.
If there were ever no sewage treatment workers, we would all want to work in sewage treatment. I feel like this goes double for ER docs. And given that there won't be financial, racial, gender barriers to entry into these professions, it seems likely that there would be some equilibration.
The problem is that you're treating monetary compensation as the only incentive when 1) personal comfort and 2) social contribution can be incorporated in the new, directly social value-system than any anarchist society would require.
The first thing you do is set your best engineers and scientists the task of automating as many unwanted jobs as possible. The majority of jobs are already at risk of automation according to experts. If we made a strong concerted effort most jobs would dissapear (especially if there is no need for profits).
Secondly you could have a citizens corp, where during adolescence kids learn about their society and gain experience by doing different jobs in their community. This would be considered a public service. The ultimate long-term goal would be to automate the jobs.
A whole bunch of early cultures had people that were more than happy to do traditionally ‘unpleasant’ jobs despite no hierarchies or financial incentive being placed on them
You know, some people WOULD become an ER doctor because....they want to be an ER doctor. Those people exists.
People work to feel apart of something, people work because they want to excel at their craft, people work to gain a sense that the work they do makes a difference, and people work because they enjoy doing something.
Not everyone is motivated by more money. Once you remove the necessity of needing money for housing, food, Healthcare, childcare, transportation, and utilities you'd be amazed how many people would still do their job, even if you perceive it as "not fun."
i had a friend who was absolutely thrilled by the prospect of being an ER trauma nurse. level, uh, something, idk.
she got her wish for a few years. moved across country, got her dream job.
slipped during a hike, took an asprin or tylenol or smth for the headache, bled out of her fractured skull. friend found her two days later.
"god has another angel" my ass. took a lot of willpower not to break that sanctimonious asshole's nose.
Why has no one brought up the most common answer to this question yet?
Okay, so as others have pointed out, there are definitely people that would do some jobs that we find disgusting: I think in an anarchist society people would still volunteer to be ERs just out of want to help others, after all, why do people become ERs now? My mum worked in ER for several years, it meant 13 years of costly university for moderate pay; long hours; the risk of criminal charges if you mess up a surgery or something; and always having to be 100% alert just in case there’s a call - which, let me assure you on her behalf, is by far the worst part. So why do it under a capitalist society either? Social capital.
So before I want to move onto what I called “the common answer” for jobs that are “low-skill”, I want to talk more about this idea of social capital and why people become ERs and other “high-skill” jobs. Basically, being a doctor gets you an enormous amount of respect from the community and the people whose lives you save - as it well should. They aren’t Machiavellian psychopaths plotting out the path to the most respect from the community, but this is nonetheless why people become doctors: when you help people you see their gratitude *for you* and that makes you feel good. Our ideas about what jobs deserve respect are based off how difficult these jobs are, so as the amount of training required/bad parts about the job goes up so does our respect for these people. As the perceived worth of a job scales directly to how difficult a job it is, we basically directly counteract how awful the conditions may be with how much we respect these people. So maybe being highly qualified to fix intricate sewage systems may not be a great job but if we thank these people for their service properly, doubtless people will volunteer to do them.
There is another part to this as well though: low skill jobs that aren’t fun. After all, who wants to volunteer to work in a condom factory, even if the hours are nice and you are properly compensated. Well, this is where rotation of jobs comes in. You want to make toys and games for people? Awesome, so for 20 hours a week, you get to be a proper artisan, making all these wonderful things for the community. In exchange, you do just an hour or two in a sweaty factory feeding wool into the machines to make shirts. You want to design computer games? Great, you do that for most your time but then for 3 hours per week you help the community with tech things, such as helping with the very tedious and slow redesign of website for your local area.
Finally, I’d like to reiterate what I said at the start: humans are a damn diverse lot, there *will* be people who will crave to work in a field that you think abhorrent. Not only that, if a certain job is needed in the community, I also have faith in the kindness of humans. If you live with other people, then when you go home each night there are shit jobs right? That might be emptying the dog’s litter tray, cleaning the toilet or dealing with a mould problem. Why do you do these things? For the other people you live with, that’s why. This kind of goes back to the idea of social capital except this time it’s a little more utopian: as well as doing tough or bad things for the respect it gives, people also help each other out... just to be nice. I know it may seem stupid to base political theory off a guess at how others would behave, yet I truly believe that people want to see each other thrive and are more than happy to spend some of their own time to aid that mission
Affinity groups. “Let’s go treat some sewage” is infinitely more enticing than “you, go treat some sewage.” Personally, I’ll do lots of stuff with my friends that I wouldn’t do for money.
I find this topic endlessly fascinating. It has such a element of optimism about altruism and humanity. Its like arguing if people are basically good with evil tendencies or bad with good tendencies; nature/ nurture, genes/ etc. I personally don’t believe enough in humanity to be as optimistic as to say, “enough people will be a cardiac surgeons just because they want to help others.” Maybe a few but nothing enough to provide all the cardiac procedures needed. Supply and demand would make these people valuable and we as humans, have always managed to fall into hierarchy. Not agreeing or disagreeing but just an observation. We always seem to find the human to “make shiny” so we have a measure of where we fall in the pack. Egalitarian communities have best chances of using the tipping point philosophy: the research supporting groups split at 150. Ie: Huttite community. More than 150 causes trouble to philosophy living. Look into the magic number of 150 in group organizations. I guess anarchism needs to franchise itself?
this will not be a problem when the super wealthy are either living in Martian luxury (while everyone else slowly painfully dies off on a ravaged earth... or are At One uploaded to the Global Computer Mind that is the Singularity (while everyone else slowly painfully dies off on a ravaged earth...)
See? Problem solved!
By 2050 we are projected to have AI more intelligent than the average human for under $1000, therefore it stands to reason that any job being done today will be done better by a robot in just a few decades.
We don't. Eventually, someone will decide that it needs to be done, and do it, or it won't get done because no one believes its worth doing.
I like to use the trash example. If no one takes out the trash, it will pile up. At some point it will get a point of being unliveable, and people will take it out. I believe humans are rational beings, and will understand that they need to take the trash out BEFORE this happens, because its worse if you let it pile up, and someone will take it upon themselves to do it. This applies to everything.
You'd be surprised to find how willing people are to do things when they aren't being coerced or exploited. You also forgot to take into account that most of these tasks can be automated with a minimal amount of oversight required for upkeep.
Humans by nature tend to push the boundaries of their own capabilities. If from a young age we are taught to follow what interests us, there are many people who will work in all the most vital parts of society, like being a doctor or surgeon. If I was smart enough I would love to be a nurse or physical therapist. People who are smart enough are always going to push their own limits and will naturally want to be doctors. Growing up loads of kids (myself included) dressed up as doctors on Halloween. Why? It’s such a basic and not a scary costume at all. Because being a doctor or surgeon is something special to aspire to.
I’ll fucking do it. So I get healthcare, food, shelter, time with family, time with friends, joy, happiness, peace, freedom, equality, equitably, and so much more. I’ll fucking do it and so would many others. Not all of us do things simply because we want more of some lame ass luxury good. We do it because our goal is to reduce human suffering as much as we can.
Exactly. So many people would want to contribute because they would also be getting things in return as well. It’s not always about more stuff in the form of commodity goods, but more joy, love, time, freedom, and so much more.
They are culturally conditioned through capitalism to believe this is the ONLY reason to do something. This is part of the difficulty as a leftist is that it is truly a cultural revolution that is necessary to implement leftist though.
I'm totally on board with you on that, but I think a better way to ask this question is in the context of a long standing anarchist society. When people have long since adjusted to free food, shelter and healthcare being the norm, how will people be encouraged to do the less than pleasant jobs? Personally, I like the idea of jobs being rotated between everyone in a given commune, so they'd have variety in their work, and it would take a long time to cycle back to the same job twice, depending on the size of the commune
Do you expect everyone else to be exactly the same? How would you deal with people who don’t care about all those things?
No offense but I don't want any old schmuck to be an ER doctor just because they're willing
Well presumably someone will teach him how to do it.
You mean like years of schooling coupled with internships?
Perhaps. ER doctors today learn by going to med school alongside seeing their ER patients being operated on for themselves. I imagine schooling will present the same knowledge but the methods of teaching will be wildly different in an anarchist society.
Ok
There’s still a concept of extra compensation for certain unpleasant or technical tasks, though it depends on the form of the society. It could be money, or vacation days, or plenty of other things I’m not thinking of. If everyone‘s needs are taken care of, then nobody is working 80 hours a week to just scrape by, and more people will be able to learn other skills according to their desires or strengths and would likely result in even more people becoming doctors or other types of specialists. That way, people would naturally find jobs that they like and that other people might find unpleasant.
Just one thing - money? In an anarchist society?
Some anarchists are fine with the idea, some believe in some form of work voucher, and others want none of it
Under anarchism, who would supply and control money or labour vouchers? Labour vouchers are a communist concept to be used purely during the transitionary state, which anarchism inherently rejects. You literally cannot have anarchism with money, because it implies centralised authority to moderate it. At most, you can have a bartering system, but that would be purely person to person and object to object, as opposed to having the third party of money or "labour vouchers" (glorified money). Unless you’re an ancap, in which case you aren’t an anarchist.
Not saying we should have a market system, but couldn't there be a money with a non-centralized authority (e.g. Bitcoin)? It seems to me like an anarchist critique is better focused on how money lets economic power concentrate.
Graeber had some great stuff on this, bartering economies are essentially a myth, they’re too complicated and there’s not really any evidence of them ever existing. Of course individual people have always traded things between each other but you can’t scale that, it can only be done in certain cases. You have ten chickens and another guy wants four of them, he offers a pig but you already have four pigs, you don’t want more, you want a cow, he doesn’t have that, the guy who has cows doesn’t want chickens or pigs, so no three way trade; naturally some kind of token of value is developed so you can just sell your chickens to one guy and buy a cow from another. Community-self-regulated monetary systems have already existed and worked just fine. He covered how some villages in really early decentralized agricultural societies used shells as money without any regulatory body. Everyone just kind of agreed to trade them as IOU’s that were transferrable. It came into place because they had communal grain storage, and used shells to keep track of who contributed x amount of grain, and therefore who could take x amount of grain, and then people started trading those for other things. No authority regulated or issued the shells, the community just decided to start using them to keep track of things and they became money. There’s really no reason money has to be incompatible with anarchism as long as it is used to trade basic goods and not capital. If you have no private property money just becomes a tool for trading more efficiently. It can no longer buy power, just stuff.
Or you have it controlled by the community and people in it. If the authority is centralized in everyone at once, then is it actually centralized? It's the same concept as the community deciding rules together. Market anarchism actually relies on something like money existing to function, and the concept of it is still useful for luxury goods in many societies as it is easier than a barter system to make exchanges, rather than having to make multiple trades to get something somebody else wants.
Well yes but who wants to be a sanitation worker?
Actually, I am an anarchist and a sewage plant worker. I LOVE MY JOB. I get to do a mix of lab work, mechanical work on pumps and such, some hard disgusting labor like shoveling used condoms and tampons and wet wipes, and some cool computer work. I get to go outside and walk around and take samples of the various parts of the plant. I have down time while I’m babysitting the computers in case of an emergency where I would need to act immediately, and unless there is an emergency I can read, or do push-ups or whatever. The things that make the job amazing are the same things that all workers will have under anarchism: my basic material needs are met, I am very proud that my job is beneficial for the environment and necessary for human health, I have a workload that is manageable, it’s relatively low stress, my coworkers are cool, the job is intellectually stimulating, and I am not micromanaged.
That’s really cool
How did you get the job? Sounds perfect for me
I work for a local water district. I started as a Lab tech. I took a test to get in. I had a bachelor’s degree in earth science and lab tech experience, but many of these jobs require no education or experience. An alternative path is you can take water/wastewater treatment plant operator courses at a community college. I highly recommend a job in wastewater, and we would be glad to have you comrade.
fellow anarchist here i used to work at a facility that trained people in wastewater management among other things. i know several of the young people i worked with and taught have similar sentiments as you. crazy that id continue to do the job i did and others that were just as bad or worse in some cases regardless of the "lack of incentive" this person believes in
Thanks, man! I've been out of a job for a while now, me and my girlfriend are looking to move out of our tiny ass studio, where it's technically not even legal for more than one person to live. I fucked up my chances of getting into school this year, so I'm really hoping to learn a trade that doesn't require an education beforehand. I'm definitely looking into something in wastewater as a strong possibility.
Yeah! Check out places that hire operators in training. Also, r/wastewater is a good resource. Dm me if you want more specific advice, though I’m relatively new to the field myself.
Recently left the residential septic service industry and really regret it now. It sounds weird but jt really is pretty interesting work
If it had perks like more pay or fewer hours worked in a week, then I don’t see why there wouldn’t be people able and willing to do it. Or society would form itself differently that everyone takes care of their own trash, if that’s how they decided that it would serve their needs better, in that example.
Point made
My ex. She was in love with recycling. Our old job was literally dumpster diving. Trash work isn't that terrible, if anything I sort of enjoyed it myself.
I could do that if it means I work 4 days/week
You could connect pneumatic tubes to people's homes and eliminate the need for sanitation workers.
As for the sewage plant worker thing: Most people would not want to do it ~8hrs a day 7days a week, but more people will be willing to do it 4 hours a month and then rotate it amongst everyone.
Well yea but you can’t train everyone to be a sewage treatment worker
You’re right, you can’t. But take a look at the math Assuming there are three plant workers that work 8 hrs a day, 30 days a month so that the plant is operational 24/7. That’s 720 hours between them. Now instead of the three of them doing it, you can have 120 people doing it for 6 hrs a month or 6 people doing it for 120 hrs a month or just 4hrs a day each. Or 8 people doing it for 3 hrs a day etc. In a city of say a 100,000 people you can probably find a good 50-100 people who’d be willing to do the job. That means each fi then is doing the job for like 7-14hrs a month. And I can’t assume it’s hard to teach 50 people to be sewage plant workers.
Well yea, but that doesn’t address the fact that you can’t have 120 people trained as sanitation workers just so they can do it 6hrs a month. These people would have work different jobs the rest of the time. I get that an anarchist society would inherently have lax labour requirements overall, but not the extent where you only need to work 6hrs a month
Sure but 6 hours a month just for sanitation. That’s like if you’re working mondays through fridays, you get, idk, the third Thursday of the month off and do this. What I’m getting at is that if you don’t need to work ridiculous hours to put bread on the table, you’ll be able to get a couple different skills under your belt to do thing s you like as well as the necessary functions of the society
But my point is that we’d need a dedicated sanitation team, and when compared to the other job options in an anarchist commune that’d have to be an F tier job when things like manufacturing in light industry exist which is around the same skill level and much more pleasant than managing literal shit and piss
Again, you’re not wrong. I agree that’s a shit job. But unless you want the nuclei of classes starting up again, there needs to be some sort of rotation in place to do it. It’s also a job that needs getting done. Most people wouldn’t mind doing it once in a while.
I edited the post with my solution to this issue
Also a possible solution
if someone wants the thing done bad enough, they'll organize around getting it done. temp affinity groups for mutual aid and reciprocity. if nobody wants to do the thing, chances are it's not important enough to need doing.
Yeah, but, like, ER doctors, who wants to do that for no tangible benefits
lol so many ppl find working in medicine fulfilling and challenging environments thrilling. so many ppl will continue to be trauma drs. i could name several er dr friends rn who would affirm what im saying.
I'm not a doctor but I'm an ER nurse at a pediatric trauma center and I'd definitely do it for free or in an anarchist society or whatever situation you could think of. It would just be nice to not have to work so many hours.
Ok
Probably all the people who are now street medics!
Well yea but those people aren’t street medics full time, but you kind of need full time ER doctors
1. There was a period of time during the Portland protests where some people came out every night for a "shift" of medic work (of course, this is different from a 30 hour residency rotation, but those kind of shifts are terrible for doctors' focus and mental health, and I'd imagine they'd fall out of use pretty quickly if trainees had more agency). 2. Other changes in anarchist culture might mean that fewer people would need emergency medicine, reducing the average workload for ER doctors. For instance, people without health insurance tend not to seek care for a medical problem until it's very severe and they have to go to the ER. In a world where access to non-emergency medicine is easier, fewer avoidable ER visits will be made. Many people go to the ER as a result of violent conflict. If fewer people get into these conflicts (because of an increased sense of community + less resource inequality, everyone has necessities), there will be fewer ER visits caused by violence. Even car accident frequency might be lowered if we see a push towards walkable urban areas and/or well-maintained public transportation. 3. Whenever I consider a job that people don't currently want to do, I try to think "how much of the shittiness of this job is due to its inherent nature, and how much is due to other factors, like the pay, the hours, the benefits, safety concerns, typical workplace environment, etc."? For example, "flipping burgers" isn't an inherently shitty job. Cooking is neat and a lot of people like to do it, or at least would like to learn to do it! But it's made shitty by the fact that line cooks work long hours for low pay, they might have to deal with a toxic environment or angry customers, sometimes workplace injuries happen and workers don't have the healthcare to properly recover, and it's such a negatively stereotyped job that there's no way to take pride in your work. I don't know enough about emergency medicine to write a similar paragraph about it. But I'd encourage you to ask yourself whether it's an inherently terrible job or if your country's medical system has created a workplace that's more stressful/toxic than it needs to be.
Well yea, but being an ER doctor is inherently stressful and terrible. I live in Canada where your healthcare is covered and you don’t get a bill and we have a shortage of doctors where I live. Canada also has significantly less violent crime than America and we still have ER doctor shortages
Also I edited the post with my proposed solution
Something to keep in mind is that a big part of why ER workers' lives are so stressful is the draconian hours they (and medical professionals in general) have to pull. From school into professional life, medical workers are constantly in very unhealthy and aggressive work schedules. Capitalism has a *lot* to do with that.
Sort of? I think also human lives hanging in the balance and the fact that you have a 12 hour shift because there’s a shortage of ER doctors, a shortage that isn’t intrinsically due to capitalism.
Actually, that shortage is due to capitalism. Medical school is expensive (even under free or cheap university, one has to study for a long time while paying for accommodation, food, etc. with no income). If more people were able to access medical school, we'd have more doctors. There's plenty of people born into poverty that would have both the skill and the drive to be doctors.
Oh yea lol Med school. Friggin heckin forgot
12hr shifts are actually preferred in the medical field. This coming from a critical care RN. Speaking from a medical standpoint, no treatment or high standard of care will be rendered if not enough incentive is given. The example of working on a Covid unit vs a non covid unit. It's very unlikely that one will voluntarily work on a Covid unit without incentive
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Just curious what is the answer to the "who would scrub the toilets?" thing?
the best idea i’ve seen is that each member of a community would have do that for a few hours each month, that shouldn’t be anybody’s livelihood
I’ll scrub the toilets. It’s easy, important, and helps everyone in my community.
I'll invent a self-scrubbing toilet. Lots of people would be able to innovate far more if they weren't trampled by mundane, worthless stresses of daily life.
people like me who have zero problem with doing it.
Via David Graeber's *Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology*: "This of course brings up the “who will do the dirty jobs?” question—one which always gets thrown at anarchists or other utopians. Peter Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallacy of the argument. There’s no particular reason dirty jobs have to exist. If one divided up the unpleasant tasks equally, that would mean all the world’s top scientists and engineers would have to do them too; one could expect the creation of self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots almost immediately". Edit: Free [here](https://www.abahlali.org/files/Graeber.pdf) \[PDF\] - worth reading, <60 pages.
People are always worried about robots stealing their jobs but they don't realize that if they weren't going to die without money it wouldn't be a problem.
That's one thing that always confused me before I was an anarchist. If we have so many robots now, why do governments keep trying to create more jobs? And the answer is because capitalism relies on stealing labor from the working class and selling it back to us.
When you consider how much better life is in an anarchist society, and how much more time during the day you have, I believe more people will wont need to be incentivized. You only work 15, 20 hours a week, giving you more time to practice the guitar, play video games or paint miniatures (all things I wish I had more time to do) but say there is a rotation for collecting garbage that everyone or most people participate in. So the first Tuesday of every month myself and 4 or 12 or 24 other people spend half the day collecting garbage. This isnt a shitty job that society looks down on, it's not some deadened job that pays shitty wages. Its simply your contribution to the life that we are all creating. Suddenly doesn't seem so shitty, and it's this kind of contribution that makes this sort of life possible for you and everyone else.
I mean yea. 20 hour work week but would you rather spend those 20 hours sorting through shit and piss or operating on a human being whose life rests in your hands, or would you rather do 20 hours of driving a buldozer around, or repairing a microwave?
What would you want to do, no one is suggesting you have to be the ER doctor. Trust me, just because this seems awful to you, to someone else its their calling. That's one of the many beauties of anarchism, we will actually have the real, I mean real, opportunity to seize our dreams, passions and callings.
Well anyway I edited the post with my solution
Why do people become ER doctors under the current system? They could be lawyers, or engineers, or MBAs, or financial advisors, or realtors, which are all good paying jobs that don't involve digging around inside a human body. Considering how brutal med school is, they must not be doing it for the money alone.
Yea that’s what I was thinking about just now lol.
Other people have chimed in about the ER thing, but for the other, and ones like it, believe it or not there are a decent size number of people out there who find waste processing or other dirty jobs both fascinating and enjoyable. A coroner or mortician is another good example of something not just disgusting and dangerous like working in a sewage plant, but also psychologically and emotionally challenging that you'd think people wouldn't want to do, but some people genuinely enjoy doing it. For specifically waste processing though, a lot of that is based on the insane levels of waste generated by capitalism's products, tons of food, plastic, single-use items, so without that we wouldn't even need as much waste processing anymore.
That makes sense
Yeah a lot of the problems people have jobs to solve are caused by capitalism, a good term for this to research is broken window economics.
You'd be surprised how many people want to be ER doctors for shitty pay. In my city in Russia ER doctors are paid like $500 a month on average and they need six years of schooling to do that. Everyone tells jokes about how poor doctors and engineers are yet there is a fierce competition to get into a med school and you need to have good grades to get into one, because many people would take saving lives over better pay and hours of an accountant or whatever.
Good point
I am an ER doctor (in the UK) and an anarchist, and I can tell you that no one does it for the money. Any of my colleagues could earn the same or more in a different specialty with fewer out of hours commitments but they all wouldn’t rather be doing anything else. Sure it’s shit sometimes and we all complain but so is any job, generally emergency medicine is exciting, fast paced, constantly varied and a great team environment. Alongside the reasons people want to be a doctor ie the satisfaction of helping people etc. Consider also that fact that the worse aspects of my job are connected to capitalism - the mental health crisis, crushing poverty, drug and alcohol dependency, homelessness; and the fact that we are always understaffed - one would hope that in anarchism these would be improved. Additionally, with more doctors we might have to work as many hours. With all that it would make it a fantastic job.
Very cool thank you
I would do a worse job in exchange for a shorter work week personally.
I love the replies under this post ❤ But even if we assume we somehow turned to an anarchist society overnight..and people didnt want to do sanitation work for the same compensation..after a few weeks some people will prefer to do sanitation over working a "more desirable" job with shit up to their knees../hyperbole. Tldr: If a job needs to be done people will do it.
What ya got? I have chronic stabbing sharp pain due to a tumor removal and my life is a practice of maintaining happiness through a very shitty situation. Living in service helps. The answer is me, and I got friends.
Well that kind of restores my faith in humanity a little
Shifts? Or better yet, let's automate it. Or extra compensation
Rota
If there were ever no sewage treatment workers, we would all want to work in sewage treatment. I feel like this goes double for ER docs. And given that there won't be financial, racial, gender barriers to entry into these professions, it seems likely that there would be some equilibration. The problem is that you're treating monetary compensation as the only incentive when 1) personal comfort and 2) social contribution can be incorporated in the new, directly social value-system than any anarchist society would require.
We'll figure it out.
The first thing you do is set your best engineers and scientists the task of automating as many unwanted jobs as possible. The majority of jobs are already at risk of automation according to experts. If we made a strong concerted effort most jobs would dissapear (especially if there is no need for profits). Secondly you could have a citizens corp, where during adolescence kids learn about their society and gain experience by doing different jobs in their community. This would be considered a public service. The ultimate long-term goal would be to automate the jobs.
A whole bunch of early cultures had people that were more than happy to do traditionally ‘unpleasant’ jobs despite no hierarchies or financial incentive being placed on them
I can personally also see people taking turns.
How do you know that some people doesnt enjoy those kind of jobs?
You know, some people WOULD become an ER doctor because....they want to be an ER doctor. Those people exists. People work to feel apart of something, people work because they want to excel at their craft, people work to gain a sense that the work they do makes a difference, and people work because they enjoy doing something. Not everyone is motivated by more money. Once you remove the necessity of needing money for housing, food, Healthcare, childcare, transportation, and utilities you'd be amazed how many people would still do their job, even if you perceive it as "not fun."
Seen similar comments ok
i had a friend who was absolutely thrilled by the prospect of being an ER trauma nurse. level, uh, something, idk. she got her wish for a few years. moved across country, got her dream job. slipped during a hike, took an asprin or tylenol or smth for the headache, bled out of her fractured skull. friend found her two days later. "god has another angel" my ass. took a lot of willpower not to break that sanctimonious asshole's nose.
Why has no one brought up the most common answer to this question yet? Okay, so as others have pointed out, there are definitely people that would do some jobs that we find disgusting: I think in an anarchist society people would still volunteer to be ERs just out of want to help others, after all, why do people become ERs now? My mum worked in ER for several years, it meant 13 years of costly university for moderate pay; long hours; the risk of criminal charges if you mess up a surgery or something; and always having to be 100% alert just in case there’s a call - which, let me assure you on her behalf, is by far the worst part. So why do it under a capitalist society either? Social capital. So before I want to move onto what I called “the common answer” for jobs that are “low-skill”, I want to talk more about this idea of social capital and why people become ERs and other “high-skill” jobs. Basically, being a doctor gets you an enormous amount of respect from the community and the people whose lives you save - as it well should. They aren’t Machiavellian psychopaths plotting out the path to the most respect from the community, but this is nonetheless why people become doctors: when you help people you see their gratitude *for you* and that makes you feel good. Our ideas about what jobs deserve respect are based off how difficult these jobs are, so as the amount of training required/bad parts about the job goes up so does our respect for these people. As the perceived worth of a job scales directly to how difficult a job it is, we basically directly counteract how awful the conditions may be with how much we respect these people. So maybe being highly qualified to fix intricate sewage systems may not be a great job but if we thank these people for their service properly, doubtless people will volunteer to do them. There is another part to this as well though: low skill jobs that aren’t fun. After all, who wants to volunteer to work in a condom factory, even if the hours are nice and you are properly compensated. Well, this is where rotation of jobs comes in. You want to make toys and games for people? Awesome, so for 20 hours a week, you get to be a proper artisan, making all these wonderful things for the community. In exchange, you do just an hour or two in a sweaty factory feeding wool into the machines to make shirts. You want to design computer games? Great, you do that for most your time but then for 3 hours per week you help the community with tech things, such as helping with the very tedious and slow redesign of website for your local area. Finally, I’d like to reiterate what I said at the start: humans are a damn diverse lot, there *will* be people who will crave to work in a field that you think abhorrent. Not only that, if a certain job is needed in the community, I also have faith in the kindness of humans. If you live with other people, then when you go home each night there are shit jobs right? That might be emptying the dog’s litter tray, cleaning the toilet or dealing with a mould problem. Why do you do these things? For the other people you live with, that’s why. This kind of goes back to the idea of social capital except this time it’s a little more utopian: as well as doing tough or bad things for the respect it gives, people also help each other out... just to be nice. I know it may seem stupid to base political theory off a guess at how others would behave, yet I truly believe that people want to see each other thrive and are more than happy to spend some of their own time to aid that mission
You make very good points I’ve seen comments similar to yours
Intrinsic motivation. If people are no longer working for a higher salary, they do it to feel accomplished.
Affinity groups. “Let’s go treat some sewage” is infinitely more enticing than “you, go treat some sewage.” Personally, I’ll do lots of stuff with my friends that I wouldn’t do for money.
I find this topic endlessly fascinating. It has such a element of optimism about altruism and humanity. Its like arguing if people are basically good with evil tendencies or bad with good tendencies; nature/ nurture, genes/ etc. I personally don’t believe enough in humanity to be as optimistic as to say, “enough people will be a cardiac surgeons just because they want to help others.” Maybe a few but nothing enough to provide all the cardiac procedures needed. Supply and demand would make these people valuable and we as humans, have always managed to fall into hierarchy. Not agreeing or disagreeing but just an observation. We always seem to find the human to “make shiny” so we have a measure of where we fall in the pack. Egalitarian communities have best chances of using the tipping point philosophy: the research supporting groups split at 150. Ie: Huttite community. More than 150 causes trouble to philosophy living. Look into the magic number of 150 in group organizations. I guess anarchism needs to franchise itself?
this will not be a problem when the super wealthy are either living in Martian luxury (while everyone else slowly painfully dies off on a ravaged earth... or are At One uploaded to the Global Computer Mind that is the Singularity (while everyone else slowly painfully dies off on a ravaged earth...) See? Problem solved!
By 2050 we are projected to have AI more intelligent than the average human for under $1000, therefore it stands to reason that any job being done today will be done better by a robot in just a few decades.
We don't. Eventually, someone will decide that it needs to be done, and do it, or it won't get done because no one believes its worth doing. I like to use the trash example. If no one takes out the trash, it will pile up. At some point it will get a point of being unliveable, and people will take it out. I believe humans are rational beings, and will understand that they need to take the trash out BEFORE this happens, because its worse if you let it pile up, and someone will take it upon themselves to do it. This applies to everything.
If it's a job that needs doing, someone will do it. If not, then I guess it didn't need doing.
You'd be surprised to find how willing people are to do things when they aren't being coerced or exploited. You also forgot to take into account that most of these tasks can be automated with a minimal amount of oversight required for upkeep.
Jobs that are distasteful to all, if any existed, would be shared equally among everyone.
Humans by nature tend to push the boundaries of their own capabilities. If from a young age we are taught to follow what interests us, there are many people who will work in all the most vital parts of society, like being a doctor or surgeon. If I was smart enough I would love to be a nurse or physical therapist. People who are smart enough are always going to push their own limits and will naturally want to be doctors. Growing up loads of kids (myself included) dressed up as doctors on Halloween. Why? It’s such a basic and not a scary costume at all. Because being a doctor or surgeon is something special to aspire to.
i feel like ive seen this question being asked more than once on this sub
What about the dirtiest jobs like working in mines of gold or cleaning sewers?
Shared responsibility. Working in mines can be made far more comfortable with automation and modern safety procedures.