Ask Lemmy

There's definitely motivation outside of pay. People can value doing jobs that are critical for society knowing that they're helping

Under Maoism or Stalinism, aka the dictatorship of the dictator pretending to act for the proletariat? You are ordered to do it, for your own good and the good of the Party. If you don't follow orders, you just get shot; and your family is put in a prison camp, your children raped and beaten and forced to labor.

Under real stateless, classless communism? Nobody knows, because that hasn't existed yet. Anyone claiming to know exactly how it might operate is talking out of their hat. Marx is pretty clear on that.

I don't think communism means "everyone gets paid the same regardless of work".

Also capitalism doesn't mean that people get paid more or less depending on type of work.

Capitalist means that means of productions are privately owned by capital. While in communism means of production are owned by work.

At least that's the theory.

Why are some people veterinarians? Specialized and low paying for the amount of education needed and debt incurred.

Why are some people firefighters? Dangerous and not particularly high paying.

Your personal motivations don’t represent any society, at large.

Your premise is that people only choose jobs because of the salary? I reject that premise. All information I’m aware of tells us that most people choose jobs because of aptitude, interest, skills and prestige, not because of financial concerns (given that all jobs compensate equally).

It should also be noted that communism doesn’t mean uniform pay. You need to go back to the drawing board and rephrase your question.

Also it’s absurd to suggest that capitalism rewards dangerous jobs more, when it clearly doesn’t. Your example is terrible because power generation is heavily regulated and very safe. The most dangerous jobs are extraction or harvesting jobs, and they can be high paid…but are not well paid in the most dangerous circumstances.

In The Dispossed by Ursula Le Guin everyone takes turns at the unfavourable jobs. A character asks whether that's inefficient having to constantly train people. Well yes, is the answer, but what are you going to do? Force people to do work that kills them?

Good book. Highly recommend

Why do people do things like rock climbing and other activities that have a high risk of injury or death when mistakes are made without being paid? Some people find dangerous stuff to be more enjoyable than less dangerous stuff.

Most dangerous jobs under capitalism are NOT well paid. People will do dangerous jobs for many reasons, but pay is rarely one of them.

Without subversive profit incentives, the incentives become to make necessary-but-undesirable jobs more safe/pleasant/automated. Without worrying about their next paycheque, people can spend time on the issue.

This requires a post-scarcity society that is fairly well developed, before they try to convert to communism.

I wouldn't necessarily say that capitalism pays dangerous or unpleasant jobs well, though. Some do, but lots don't.

For some people they choose these fields out of a sense of duty to the community but this is rare and not likely to fill the required productive capacity. The end goal should be automating these fields and a communist society run by workers would inherently work towards this goal. However in the mean time incentives like an early retirement and reduced working hours would likely boost numbers significantly. This is a sacrifice though as it means more people are required to do the job and these workers stop contributing to society at an earlier age, depending on the material conditions and specific stage of development this could be much harder to accomplish in which case that sense of duty would have to be reinforced by culture. The socialist transition is no paradise, it requires dangerous work and personal sacrifice to create a better world. There are likely other incentives that could be implemented more easily but these are the first two I thought of.

Let me try this in levels.

Under the transitionary phase between capitalism and communism, there is still currency/money, there is still commodity production, there are still bank accounts. So, for things that society needs but people are less willing to do, the answer is compensation. Communist parties have always compensated people for their work, yes even prison laborers, and for the work that fewer people are qualified for or fewer people desire to do, that compensation is increased to create incentives.

When we reduce that to simplest form, the answer is incentives.

Before capitalism, people still did dangerous work and difficult work. They didn't do it because they were going to get rich (they weren't), they did it because the consequences of not doing it were dire.

In feudal and slave societies, this is because the consequences, though they might be social, we're personalized by the oppression of lords and masters. Lords and masters beat, tortured, and killed serfs and slaves to incentivize them to do dangerous and difficult work.

But what about before those societies? In nomadic societies, people did difficult and dangerous work because it needed to be done, and the consequences of not doing it were felt by the whole tribe. People weren't tortured and murdered to incentivize them to do the dangerous work. In fact, people got together and tried to make the dangerous work less dangerous.

Reducing those things down, we have an understanding of what "difficult and dangerous" work really is - socially necessary work.

We also understand how it can be solved without incentives - socially collaborative problem solving.

So, in the transition between capitalism and communism, we still incentives and we still have socially necessary work.

Why do we call it a transitionary period? What is happening to make a transition?

The transitionary period is the period of socially collaborative problem solving to make socially necessary work both less voluminous and less risky (which includes risk of harm as well as risk of understaffing and risk of knowledge loss). No one knows that communism looks like yet. But we know what contemporary experiments exist in reducing the volume and risk of socially necessary labor - robotics, real-time systems monitoring and feedback, new construction methods, new chemical science, new applications of physics, etc.

As it turns out, sedentary lifestyles are also incredibly dangerous and lead to huge numbers of premature deaths. So it's unlikely that communism will go the same direction capitalism seems to go, with huge numbers of people sitting in office chairs or couches for decades on end.

You get more stuff, more status, etc. Or alternatively, penalized, threatened, etc. Whatever it takes to motivate people to do the job. Even if paper money isn't a thing in communist societies (which it still is), money's just a symbol for debt. You're going to get something, somehow, for a job people greatly desire to be done without enough doers and they'll become "indebted" to you disproportionately for doing it.

In Soviet society for instance, you might be provided a nice apartment in central Moscow if you were doing something "important". This assignment would be via your government-controlled employer and their agreements with some other government bureau that officially managed the buildings to dole them out to select people.

So, same deal as anywhere else, just a different mechanism. Higher ration, bigger dacha, jump to the front of the line to get a car, etc.

Compensation is usually not much about how dangerous a job is, though. It's more about how many people are willing to do it for any number of reasons. Some people are just not very risk-adverse, and figure they're going to be fine at a job that is more dangerous. And they'll be compensated at a normal level as long as there are enough such people to fill the need.

Not to pry but what do you consider "good pay" for those conditions?

the highly dangerous jobs usually are done by red states people: crab fishing in alaska, Oil drilling, fracking, lumber, because the lack of Economy and jobs in thier own state, which is probably on purpose. it all pads the pockets of the elites.

assuming this isnt the case with communist top down RULE, it should be STEM fields, including psychology, environmental conservation, social sciences is a priority.

For advanced STEM degrees, there are people who just enjoy learning that sort of thing and applying their knowledge.

In the same vein, some folks are just attracted to dangerous and difficult jobs because they get a sense of purpose or identity from it.

Others it's community. I knew a guy who did 20 years active duty military, then joined the national guard, then took a job for the same national guard unit as a DoD civilian and stayed on until they forced him to retire. They had practically drag the guy out. He never did anything but bitch and complain about the work he spent more than 40 years doing, he sounded like kinda hated his job, but he liked being a part of the military.

Prestige and desire, likely.

You would probably also see the state require some labor from people in order for society to function; I imagine that certain classes of skilled and or dangerous labor would get them from having to contribute to some manual tasks.

Short answer: We don't know

Longer answer: We hope technology will be fully developed by then to do that stuff for us

Same as the incentives under any other economic system: Ambition, adventurousness, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.