Under capitalism, a lot of the time, highly dangerous jobs are also highly paid. Kind of a balance that the individual decides to engage with. Same idea behind getting an advanced degree in STEM or law. I think of my job by example, I’m a power plant operator at a large combined cycle plant. No fucking shot I’d be doing this if the pay wasn’t good. I’m around explosive and deadly hot shit all day.
It’s spelled “caste,” and castes are (critically) hereditary. Leaving a caste you were born into is virtually impossible.
People who do more/harder work can get compensated an appropriate amount. Note that this runs at odds to the current system where a CEO makes 1000x their employees salary despite not working 1000x as hard.
Ayeeee got me. I still don’t see how that doesnt just create the same type of class based system we already have.
Because everyone would have access to the same opportunities and same schools etc. Those with better talents or a better work ethic will probably make more money. Instead of today where families hoard wealth through generations.
So different levels of society make different levels of money, allowing them to afford better qualities of life. You’re talking about capitalism.
In capitalism as a whole economic mobility is not very prevalent. If you are born poor you generally have a worse education, worse nutrition, worse job prospects, etc
If you are born rich it is orders of magnitude easier to end up in a high paying career since you have a financial support system
The idea here would be to make sure everyone is given the same tools to succeed and the same options. For example anyone who can pass their could go to med school vs only people who can afford to go without a livable income for 13 years while working 60-100 hours weeks
Then you reward people who choose to do things others don’t want to do which is the compromise
You can have that as home as well where the person who cleans the bathroom gets an extra cookie after dinner
This is in huge contrast to capitalism where the owner of the house gets the entire box of cookies and is benevolent enough to spare a pittance of food in exchange for the bathroom being cleaned
Everyone would have their basic needs met, and nobody would have 10,000x what other people have
The tenets of capitalism say nothing about how much each person makes. Nor do communism. If you’re eager to learn more, read something.
You know what, after reading your and one other user’s comments I’m content with a realistic reasonable answer. Basically, we have no idea what it may look like, but, there will be differences in quality of life depending on chosen profession. I think thats reasonable. All the people saying things along the lines of “they’ll just do really terrible jobs for the love of the game” are what really hurt the legitimacy of you and the other users answer, in my eyes at least.
Very basically: communism is not “everyone gets paid the same” and it is not “no hierarchy ever.” You can still have inequality in income, status, or lifestyle. The core difference is where that inequality comes from.
Under communism, the means of production are collectively owned, so no one gets rich purely by owning things other people have to use to survive. You do not get passive power over others just because your parents did well or you happened to own capital first.
The baseline is that no one is excluded from basic human needs, food, housing, healthcare, education, safety. That removes the permanent underclass capitalism reliably produces. From there, differences in pay or quality of life can exist based on contribution, skill, responsibility, or scarcity, but they are not allowed to snowball into dynastic wealth and structural domination.
So yes, different jobs can lead to different standards of living. That alone is not capitalism. Capitalism specifically requires private ownership of productive assets and wage dependence. If everyone has equal access to opportunity and no one can hoard power across generations, you do not end up with the same class system we have now.
The honest answer is also the boring one: real-world implementations vary, some badly, and no system guarantees fairness automatically. Communism is about reducing structural exploitation, not pretending humans stop being human.
People saying “everyone will just do awful jobs out of pure love” are overselling it and hurting the argument. Incentives still exist. The difference is that survival is not used as the incentive.
TLDR: Capitalism uses deprivation as motivation. Communism tries to remove deprivation first, then argue about incentives afterward. Whether that succeeds is the real debate.
This is my favorite answer. Thanks for taking the time to write it out, I’m glad I made this thread!