this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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What if a person creates a new type of clothing that has high demand because it's better than what exists before?
What if that person starts getting interest from other people who want the clothes and they try to trade currency (I'm not sure if in your communist system this exists, so consider other items people have or something) and then transactions start to happen?
What if the person gets so busy, he gets another person to help him with the trades in exchange for a fixed amount?
In which of these steps does it turn from "no one cares what you do with your own labor" to "give us your business or else"?
This simply wouldn't happen because an anarchist society wouldn't recognize intellectual property and so it would be trivial to just... make more of this kind of clothing. And no, there is no currency, and barter would be pointless as access to goods is common anyways.
This whole point to me signals a deeper (but common) misunderstanding as to what the point of it all is, though; there would be no incentive or reason for someone to act this way in any kind of postcapitalist society, because the assumptions you are making that even make this situation possible are false.
Labour is not a repulsive act that people have to be paid to do; for virtually any "job", even the most repulsive, there are some people who are truly passionate about it. But in a society where doing said work is demanded under threat of starvation, any appeal it may have had is soured by the reality of this situation and it shifts from a fulfilling and desirable action to a repulsive one.
As an extra point that not all anarchists will agree with, increases in productivity thanks to automation and technological progress (often spearheaded not by corporate projects under NDA but by the open-source community and individual hackers, only to be commercialized by corporations) mean that the real quantity of work that needs to be performed to uphold humanity at a good standard of living is drastically less than the amount currently being performed. Capitalism is inefficient, both in that it doesn't allocate resources where they're productive (accumulation of capital) and because of work duplication and artificial barriers (tech and engineering firms keeping code/designs private or patented, industry keeping trade secrets, etc.)
tl;dr that scenario is impossible.
The thing is, there are jobs that need to be done but no one wants and there are jobs everyone wants but only few are needed/have the ability to do it.
Do you really believe that in a state where everything you need is provided enough people will be "passionate" about sewer maintenance?
The thought of enough people will be passionate about every job in order to fill the required number of positions in those jobs, when everything is provided whether they work or not, is simply a delusion.
People might not be passionate about sewer maintenance, but they are about having working sewage disposal. And hey, those shitty jobs in this dynamic are valued more highly because most don't want to do it. I think that's a good thing.