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.
One of my favorite answers so far, thank you!
Communism doesn’t mean no money, undesirable labor will always have to be incentivized. I think most people would prefer to be incentivized with the promise of access to luxuries, higher pay, more vacation time, recognized status in the community, rather than the threat of your survival, housing, healthcare, education, etc. You would still have taxes, but critical infrastructure would be owned by the laborers and the state.
Ideally, because there would be no individual ownership of infrastructure or the means of production. So, again ideally, the profits are equitably distributed through labor instead of shareholders. One of the goals of this kind of system would be the elimination of class. Not because people can’t make more money and have more luxuries, but because everyone has the same opportunities. Whereas most of the world today you can just pay for those opportunities.
Now, how exactly do you pull this off? Idk, other than a massive cultural shift. I’m sure someone with a reply telling me what I got wrong will have that answer.
This isn’t entirely accurate. What you described is a ‘socialist’ community, the so-called ‘lower stage of communism’. In this stage, there would still remain incentive based structures for labour. It employs a policy of “from each according to his ability to each according to his works”. Inequality still exists as explained by Marx here:
It is during this lower stage that the transformation of social relations and productive forces gradually alters the motivations for labor to a more virtue-based one.
The problem most communism skeptic people have with communism is that they reason within the current modes of subsistence and assume it is impossible.
Marx also stated that he expected us to remain in the lower stage of communism for centuries, but it is during this stage that we prepare the productive forces to sustain communism and start producing goods for their use-value rather than for their exchange value, so that we can achieve the higher stage of communism which employs 'from each according to their ability to each according to his needs. This higher stage is truly classless because we would supposedly have solved scarcity, it would be stateless because people would organize communally to meet their needs, and it would be moneyless because the means of production and means of subsistence would be free for all to access.