This was a question or rather a series of questions I heard over the weekend as I was discussing Marxism, class, labour etc. with a friend and I frankly couldn’t really answer their questions. So here I am again asking it because this community provides incredible answers <3
The discussion was about work and their question was: “If class is abolished in communism and the people are taken care of, why would anyone work at all? Who is going to work in coffee shops, pick up trash, work in stores etc.? What would be the incentive for people to do anything productive?” I did my best saying that those jobs would still exist, but I kind of fumbled the argument.
Absolutely agree, it’s however insanely difficult to do so (I still have a lot of individualism and egoism along with decades of social conditioning to overcome). It’s doubly difficult to do so for other people around me, especially if they don’t have an open mind or don’t read theory/only read capitalist or imperialist core media.
Another big issue I run into is that people don’t feel like doing this because they will most likely never experience it themselves, so why bother if they will never live to see the day when communism wins. This is their thought process.
I think we just have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that this will be a multi-generational process.
This attitude is also part of that selfishness and short-sightedness that needs to be overcome.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Our duty to future generations is to plant the seeds.
Look at China. Do you think that the people there in the 1950s and 60s, who made huge sacrifices and worked their asses off to build China up from practically nothing, could have imagined how advanced China is today? They didn’t know whether they would be alive to see the better future they were working for, but they did it anyway. Some of those people are still alive and are now enjoying the fruits of their labor, enjoying their well earned retirement in a society with such prosperity and advanced technology that most could not even have imagined. And if they are not still alive then surely their children and grandchildren are.
They are still far away from reaching full communism, but even in the early stage of socialism there is still a lot of material and social improvement that a revolutionary project can achieve.
And this is what i think we should focus on. Not the far distant utopian future (though we should have a general plan for how to work toward it) but the small improvements that we can make along the way. In any big project it is important to set achievable intermediate goals. It’s important to give people a sense of progress. Socialism has shown time and time again that it can deliver those short to medium term results: real, tangible improvements in the lives of the people. Whether it’s housing, education, infrastructure, or social justice or whatever else. That’s why socialist states make Five Year Plans.