this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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People will volunteer to do the job because it is something they (and everyone) needs done. People won't let their entire community collapse because people "didn't want to do it". But these unsavory jobs would theoretically also spark innovation to make the jobs more bearable and probably even unneeded. Better working conditions and more free time leaves time for people to do things like invent and think.
I did volunteer work in several associations. From personal experience I can tell you that "someone will do it, a volunteer will rise" should not be relied upon. I have seen many instances of tasks that everyone was aware of, and yet no one wanted to do; even though they were important. At the end of the day, guess who completed them? The president of the association, because that's their responsibility ultimately; until they got sick of always doing these tasks so they did not want to be president again the next year.
In the case of a society where no one is responsible for given tasks, I can only guess that vital tasks would be left undone and the whole society would be collapsing. Imagine getting your electricity cut each day of "insert your most favorite celebration here" because no one felt like working during celebration day. Imagine fire becoming widespread and burning every building because at that particular day, there were not enough people with fireman skills around to extinguish the initial fire
We need to have assigned roles and responsibilities based on our skills. How do we do that in a world where you can say "Na, I know I'm the only expert on this available right now, but I don't feel like doing it today" and get away with it?
I believe people are like this due to the conditions they live in. Capitalism is a system that encourages selfishness in order to survive. I whole heartedly believe that if conditions changed, people would change. Not immediately of course. No anarchist is saying that it wouldn't be a rough transition, or that it's a flawless society, or any of that. But we do think that it would work and that it'd be better in the long run than what we have rn
Good on you to believe that. It's really sweet that you have so much faith in people.
... I don't. Look at any society on Earth. Pre-capitalism, feudal, the celts, medieval japan, whatever. Shit ain't rosy, in fact shit really fucking sucks and people suck and too many of them will mooch and rape and steal and trick and kill and endlessly seek to achieve absolute power over others if they're allowed to. That's a basic fact of human nature.
To pretend it's capitalism's fault that some people are awful to others or complete freeloaders, is just an insult to those people's intelligence of free will. A lot of people just suck, they don't need excuses.
IDK, it's not like I much care to have this conversation to be honest. It is a purely academic study of a (imo) overly utopist viewpoint, because the vast majority of people either aren't "good" in the way that you think everyone is (i.e. they know they wouldn't be a good member of an anarchist society, so they deduce that other people would be either), or they don't have such faith in their peers due to experience. Either way this is the fundamental reason why anarchism never has, and never will, take off on a large scale, regardless of how much you theorycraft it and try to explain it. Anarchists just disagree, fundamentally, with everyone else on the very nature of humankind.
Easily fixed through voluntary association in the interest of everyone. Stuff could work along the lines of everyone who wants to benefit from thing x must contribute to thing x when it comes to essential but undesirable jobs. You want sewage? You sign up for sewage. Everybody who does, has a week assigned where they must do the necessary maintainance for that utility. In practice, since so many people want sewage, it would end up once every few years. Moreover, these associations could federate and make it so that contributing to those that are shorthanded could exempt you from others. Say, you have the necessary electrical knowledge to work on that system but hate maintaining sewage. You could work on that celebration day when nobody wants to work and in exchange you are exempt from sewage duty.
If someone doesn't want to contribute in any way to society, that person won't benefit from society. It's another thing if someone cannot do anything, but those people are very few. Even those who are bed bound can contribute in some ways.
So I'm supposed to learn everything about sewer maintinence before this week, or are we throwing untrained people at critical infrastructure simply because they want to use it? And what then if I also want food, transportation, a computer, cat food, smokeables, drinkables, shelter, etc? Do I have to become an expert in all of those things too and work in those to get food, shelter, etc? Have to churn butter for a week if I want access to the butter store, and make bread for a week to get access to the bread lines, then I can make toast?
Personally I'd prefer if there was some way to make what I make or do what I do, exchange those items or services for some thing with an agreed upon value, which I can in turn take to the store and trade for bread and butter.
My experience is that most people only care for themselves and couldn't give a crap about others. For me that's just a part of human nature, for you it might be because of capitalism. But how do you know with a different system people's behaviour will change?
In the Soviet Union there was corruption from top to bottom everywhere you looked. And people did the hard jobs because they were forced to.
To me yes, most selfishness is due to the conditions capitalism cause. And I know this because looking at past anarchist revolutions, the society itself functions. But the revolutions fail militarily. And I'll admit the anarchist examples are few so not a real large sample size to go off of. So looking at hunter gather societies can give good insight as well.