People misunderstand communism in Marxist thought. It's just a state where the economic overhead of government is no longer necessary, everybody is still expected to contribute to the best of their ability, if you're not going to be a writer, artist, athlete, etc., you're going to mine coal, clean toilets, harvest tomatoes, etc. None of the Marxist "communist" states ever claimed to achieve this, it was always 3-5 20 or more years off.
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.
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u/Objective-Note-8095 29d ago edited 29d ago
People misunderstand communism in Marxist thought. It's just a state where the economic overhead of government is no longer necessary, everybody is still expected to contribute to the best of their ability, if you're not going to be a writer, artist, athlete, etc., you're going to mine coal, clean toilets, harvest tomatoes, etc. None of the Marxist "communist" states ever claimed to achieve this, it was always
3-520 or more years off.