Communism

An hour of labor is an hour of labor. Productivity can increase or decrease, but the labor will still be an hour. A chair that is able to be built in half the time it once was due to new tools and methods has less Value than it once had.

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.

If 5 people including a janitor produce 1mil in profit. And having 4 people, no janitor makes 600k in profit due to having to work in filth and taking breaks to clean up then the janitor is worth 400k. It's not really that complicated. Capitalists like to pretend these things are complicated when they're not. Companies have a damn good idea of what their janitors are worth because it's constantly compared with what they cost to see if they can do without them or outsource them to a contractor.

When it comes time to PAY them they don't care what they're worth anymore, just how little they can pay someone to do the job.

If you pay janitors the same as engineers then no one will bother going to school to study engineering.

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.

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.