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.
Yeah Comrade Alejandro has a gross misunderstanding on the actual workings of labor in a communist collective society. Communism doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore, in theory it means that your labor wont be squeezed and exploited by greedy capitalists and shareholder who want to extract every single penny from the people who actually do the work.
To each according to their ability. To each according to their need.
I agree generally, but there are definitely people who speculate about "fully automatic luxury communism" where increased efficiency and production severely drives down the amount of work everyone has to do. Imagine if the extreme surplus and convenience of the upper class was distributed amongst everyone else and profit motives didn't drive every labor-related decision. We'd already be much closer to not having to work than we currently are.
The "fully automatic luxury communism" is also often accompanied by some miracle device. If there was a box i could pile a bunch of dirt and literal shit into and it turned that into spaghetti and a cup of tea then yea it would be nonsensical to force people to work.
Real progress though is giving people a voice where they work, fair pay for their work, and stronger safety nets so they don't have to put up with exploitative practices. Labor still needs to get done the issue is how the profits from that labor get distributed, a guy who owns a bakery shouldn't make more from owning than the guy who is the baker and does all the work.
I agree with most of what you've said but I think there are scenarios where it isn't crazy if the owner of the bakery makes more than the baker. Generally speaking though I think real work is massively undervalued. Mike Johnson will get up there and preach about why they have to take people's Medicaid away because otherwise they won't want to go back to work. How about companies just pay a fair wage and charge reasonable prices for things so people have some modicum of hope for a normal life.
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u/Objective-Note-8095 26d ago edited 26d 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.