this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
221 points (94.7% liked)
Communism
1679 readers
29 users here now
Welcome to the communist Lemmy community! This is a community for all Marxist.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That’s a pretty uncharitable take. Whether people get upset or not is irrelevant. What matters is what people’s incentives are and how they respond to them.
If you pay janitors the same as engineers then no one will bother going to school to study engineering. The whole incentive structure of your economy evaporates, leading to collapse.
I think that's debatable. Personally, I went to university and had a great time there. Apart from learning, that phase of my life had lots of events, parties and spending time with friends. I always saw it as a priviledge that I had the opportunity to gather so much knowledge. Especially as school and university are paid for by the state where I live.
At the same age a janitor, someone in room service or cleaning dishes was already in the middle of their job. And while I today have a job where I get paid for solving interesting problems sitting at a comfortable desk in an airconditioned office or even at home, those other pals are still cleaning hotel rooms, dishes or scrape off bubble gum from the tables.
Personally, I think the job itself is more than sufficient of an incentive to justify higher-level education for people. That's at least my take as long as the state pays for your education like in my country.
But independent from that I'm very aware that your standpoint on this is way more popular than mine. Also had similar debates with other people in my privileged situation and they are all eager that they deserve better than a random uneducated person because they did so much hard work at university. I find that pretty ironic, because I know some of these people from university and they barely learned for the assignments and the only hard work they did was drinking at a bar or club every other night having the time of their life.
When I said no one, I didn’t mean literally zero people. I’m sure if you announced a project to launch a manned spacecraft into the sun you’d get people volunteering for the suicide mission. What I meant is that you’ll never get enough people to do it based on personal interest alone.
For every person like you who loved studying engineering in school (with all the 7 course per semester schedules, insane 8 hour days in classes plus 40+ hours of homework, “hell week” of nonstop midterms, and brutal “weed-out” final exams) there’s going to be thousands of others who just won’t bother because the pay is no better than what a janitor makes. Heck, why not study philosophy or medieval history instead?
And then when you get past school you get to the real problem: many of the jobs in these fields are incredibly dull. People might go to aerospace engineering school with big dreams of designing the next Concorde jet, yet find themselves doing nothing but paperwork review for Boeing. You think the Boeing safety scandals are bad enough in today’s capitalist world where the company is motivated by profit and the engineers are highly paid? Try getting anyone to take safety seriously when you pay everyone the same so there’s no real disincentive to avoid getting fired.
And that’s the other elephant in the room with engineering. In civil engineering the lead engineer has to sign off (and stamp with their professional seal) the plans for a project. If the building later collapses that engineer can be held criminally responsible (and face jail time) should the design be deemed unsafe by the investigation. Without paying the lead engineer any more than a junior engineer, how are you going to get anyone to accept that personal risk on themselves for no compensation whatsoever?
This applies to many other critical jobs where health and safety are on the line. Similarly for jobs where the worker is risking their own life. If you can’t compensate them for this additional personal risk (financial, criminal, or life and limb) then you’re going to have a very hard time finding people to take the job.
The other side of the coin is that some jobs will become extremely popular just because they are more fun to do. Since you can’t pay these folks any less to do the fun jobs, you’ll have a hard time deciding who is allowed to do the fun stuff and who gets stuck with the boring/dirty/dangerous/disgusting/undesirable jobs.
For example, actuarial science was a very popular major to study at my university. The field is competitive to get into and highly paid. However the job itself has a very high turnover due to people voluntarily choosing to leave! The work is so damn boring that even with high pay they can’t convince people to stay! With low pay the problem is going to be even worse. You’re going to have to lower the bar to let less intelligent/skilled people into the job but that is not likely to turn out well because the job is very technical to begin with.
The concept of Communism being "everyone gets paid the same" goes directly against Marx and the very foundations of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs:"
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
-Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
Read Wage Labor and Capital and follow it with Value, Price and Profit if you want to really understand what Marxists believe. They go in-depth on what constitutes Value by Labor.