this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Unless you assume people will work out of goodness of their hearts, every system has to somehow coerce people to work. You can't fulfill everyone's basic needs without workers.
And yes, maybe people would do some types of work anyway, but good luck finding people who find working in sanitation as an interesting hobby.
I think that people need a purpose and I think in a society not based on maximization of profit, people would have the ability to choose what that is and not have to do "whatever pays the bills"
Imagine a society where your doctors want to be doctors and your musicians want to be musicians.
In my experience watching my father retire and just living as an adult, people get squirrely when they dont have something to work on.
Work doesn't have to be what capitalism values to be work, it can ve creation, it can be gardening, it can be helping others.
Id argue people do fundamentally have drive to work as they have drive to have purpose. Work just isn't necessarily the suffering capitalism has led us to believe it is.
Yes and no. There fundamentally are jobs that are both necessary and unpleasant. It is easy to talk about things like gardening and art, but we need sanitation. Even some level of bureaucracy. There are many kinds of work people may be willing to do for free or cheaply, but also many types of work almost no one would.
PS: You can actually see this in volunteer driven open-source software projects. There are many volunteers to develop features or even fix bugs, but they sorely lack management roles and work on important but niche features (unused by most volunteers) like accessibility for blind people.
Adding another comment to address this PS.:
Those volunteers are still volunteers inside a capitalistic system that have to get by somehow. Of course they're going to spend their extremely limited free time on the things that benefit them directly (features they need, bugs that affect them). The incentive structure is set up against them. That would be very different if they didn't have the pressure of keeping afloat in spite of their volunteer work.
Perhaps, but whether it is by knowing my self or people I work with, I kinda doubt that.
Also, what exactly is it that you would need to bootstrap a group like this? Does it involve coercing people that want to keep capitalism to participate?