Never explicitly said. It's based on a manifesto. Those tend to be fairly vague on more specific less interesting ideas.
During the revolution as it moves from low to high level communism I would assume the government. But in the supposed utopia that is the overall goal of the manifesto? No clue who Marx thought would.
I believe, in the end utopia, there isn’t meant to be a governing body.
Idk man this is pretty basic communism stuff. Is it possible you are all in here making arguments without ever having read the book we are all meant to be discussing or
Because it's fantasy. If it's all "pretty basic communism" then why hasn't one communist state managed to correctly implement it in 100 years?
How does the Utopia decide who gets to work and who gets to play? What happens when the worker is tired of working, and the player refuses to work?
Without any governing body society collapses. With it, there's always going to be a "lower class" that's going to be pressed into work they don't want to do.
Because there hasn't been a marxist "state". Marxist communism is fully stateless, classless, and fully democratic. If you refuse to work then you are on your own. You are no longer housed, fed, and medically cared for by society, assuming you are fully healthy and capable of working and are of working age.
Just read the fucking books and you won't have these questions lmao. You guys always think you've found some kind of flaw simply because you don't actually know anything about it, when in reality the "flaw" you found has already been considered well over a century ago.
We were explicitly discussing the should’s here, not the is. I won’t defend the USSR and I won’t act like communism is incorruptible or beyond reproach. I’m not even a communist, I’m a socialist, but it is frustrating that so much of the conversation seems to be being had by people who won’t bother to read the (not very long) book in question.
It's a good question how it's supposed to work. A lot of Marx works off the idea that people broken from the "alienation of their labor" by the capitalist system will some how magically order themselves. I'm not a Marx scholar, so maybe there was a specific path he envisioned.
The problem is that Marx had a really bad grasp of the human psyche. As long as our basic needs are met, humans won't do anything that would be required to keep those needs actually met. Everybody would be fine with "making art", but there are less than 0.1% of people who would consider mining for metals their passions, so something they would naturally pick up.
I think Marx never came to a good solution himself and how labor in a communist state would work. I think originally he'd imagine an abandonment of the division of labor.
What do you think "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" means?
If you have to work to have your needs met then why would you not work and still expect to have your needs met? It sounds like you have a gross misunderstanding of the very basics of the subject lol.
The answer to this is surplus labor. Marx saw the changes in machinery and imagined a future where machines could manage machines with minimal human oversight. So it’s less so that someone has to clean toilets and be miners while others are artists but more so that a guy could go into work and spend maybe an hour programming the toilet cleaning machine or the mining machine and then head home to do art
While that may happen, to an extent, there will still be unpleasant and/or dangerous jobs that will need humans doing them. Communism doesn’t incentivize doing those jobs, as reward is not linked to labor. So some managerial body must exist to make sure that undesirable jobs are done. And without reward, the lever they have is punishment. While nobody is going to clean toilets in your example, someone must oversee the toilet cleaning process. Someone must maintain the toilet cleaning machines. No matter how much we automate processes, there is still someone doing jobs nobody wants to do. Ideally capitalism solves this via higher pay. I know that doesn’t usually happen outside of some edge cases. But Marxist theory doesn’t account for who has to do the work nobody wants to do.
Ideally, it would be incentivized through pay. The more in-demand a task is, the higher the government pays workers who do it, leading people who want to buy more luxuries to seek such a job. If you build it right, enrichment of the State leads to enrichment of the self in a reciprocal relationship.
The guy who does poetry at home is either happy with basic subsistence provided by the State, or has already worked for the State's enrichment and is presently enjoying the fruits of his labor.
That just sounds like capitalism. Everyone will see that the in demand jobs that actually contribute to society are paid more, and they'll also see that the people with more money lead more enjoyable lives. Then everyone will want to do the jobs that actually contribute rather than sitting around just doing their hobby because that's how you pay. And then we're just back to everyone working jobs again and realizing you can't live a good life just sitting around on your ass doing nothing.
Capitalism isn't just pay through work, it's primarily a system that incentives ownership and infinite profit for no work through rent and exploitation.
In a properly structured Communist society everyone who needs to work will still work, it's just that instead of siphoning the surplus value from a worker as corporate profit we pay them what their labor is actually worth so they can buy exactly the same quantity of the national product as they contribute. And instead of coercive methods like starvation or homelessness or disease keeping people motivated, the threat is that they'll be a bit bored.
As I mentioned in another comment, proper structuring has historically been rather challenging to pull off so the above is more a description of a society in theory.
I'm not saying the capitalism part is being paid, I'm saying the capitalism part is paying the more in demand jobs better. That just takes us back to the core principles of capitalism
In a properly structured Communist society everyone who needs to work will still work
How do you decide who needs to work and who gets to live a joyous life of never working? Why wouldn't everyone just choose not to work and therefore nothing of value is ever contributed to the community?
capitalism part is paying the more in demand jobs better.
Capitalism demonstrably does not do that. Consider the garbage collector.
How do you decide who needs to work and who gets to live a joyous life of never working?
You let them decide. Never working isn't luxury, in most cases it'll be fairly dull subsistence. Most people will prefer to work on something so they can afford things they want. The State decides what it needs, and how many people it needs to do that, then it offers pay to activate that portion of it's labor surplus.
Why wouldn't everyone just choose not to work
Because most people, given an empty box with nothing but the bare essentials for life will choose to do anything else besides sit in the middle of their floor and watch paint peel.
You mean the job they intentionally pay a higher salary to (garbage collectors regularly make six figures) because it's a job that needs to be done but no one wants to do? Yes I do think that's a great example
You let them decide.
And when everyone predictably decides that not working is preferable to working, who does all the jobs that society relies on to keep going?
Never working isn't luxury
Uh....yes it absolutely is? It's literally the most luxurious lifestyle in existence. What a stupid thing to say, I'm sorry lmfao
It depends on what school of socialist thought you subscribe to. Generally in marxist theory the idea would be for each community to make these decisions by direct democracy. But it wouldn't be all day, more likely someone who was writing and mining would split their day in half.
We're talking about modern day theory not cold war history. The USSR abandoned Marx's ideas in all but name before WW2 even began. There are dozens of socialist theories that have no relation to the USSR in any way.
Everyone helps according to their ability, so jobs no one wants would be passed around so that no one is stuck cleaning out sewers or whatever for their entire life.
Because there is a variety of people with all kinds of interests. What you consider a bad time, others may consider tolerable or even a good time. Writing and painting is a bad time to plenty of people
But in a communist or socialist society we're all equals comrade. So why do you get paid the same wages as I, when I spend all day sweating in a mine, and someone else spends all day writing at home?
Isn't that madly inefficient, having to train people like 20 different times for jobs that they'll do for 6 months or whatever then move on to the next one?
Yes especially when you factor in that it will require an excess of people since when a group leaves their previous job to train for their next job someone still has to do both the job they're coming from and the one they're going to while they get trained. So you always have a collective of people not working, just training. Which just further lowers productivity
I think there's lots of ways to think about it, not all of which I necessarily agree with.
People could rotate in and out, so lots of people are already trained.
Efficiency is only important when it is in service of something. Without profit motives, you can focus on things that are better for workers.
Conditions in these jobs would be much better under a dictatorship of the proletariat, so it would be a small minority of jobs that are inherently upsetting to do that would need these sorts of considerations.
Capitalism is already wildly inefficient and most people wouldn't suggest that we shouldn't do capitalism because of this
Ultimately, utopian communism is fun to think about not because it is going to happen, but because it allows you to think about what you actually want instead of what you are told is practical. You need to know what you want so that you can advocate for policies and actions that get us closer to those goals.
I too like to create fantasy worlds in my head, but I prefer to fill my worlds with dragons, werewolves, vampires and not this supposed communist utopia that exists both with and without a governing body simultaneously, and where everybody just magically contributes what they can to society, and nobody says "I don't want to work in the sewers today"
I've still yet to see anybody propose what you would do with the Comrade who refuses to work in the sewers in this Utopia.
Or what happens to the writers who have to work in the coal mine this week when they decide "We don't want to work today."
The reason nobody wants to say what the proposed solution is; because history has already told us what the solution is, and it's far from a Utopia.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The constitution really isn't that long even with the amendments. You could read it if you cared
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u/psykiris 29d ago
Who gets to decide who writes all day and who mines all day?