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Now let’s discuss all the people eager to volunteer to work sewage treatment plants.

The proportion of people with more innate motivation versus need for a job to be done varies wildly between jobs.

But when someone approaches work with innate motivation, amazingly better stuff happens compared to people in it just for the paycheck.

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bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
If something really needs to get done, like repairing necessary sewer systems, then it will get done, because it needs to. Do you really think that people who have the skills to repair the water treatment plant are going to just deal with sewage backing up into their home because they don’t want to do the work?

For a more comprehensive analysis of the question, I’d direct your attention towards an anarchist FAQ. I’ll quote a few choice sections below, but the link goes into great detail, comparing and contrasting multiple approaches to handling the problem.

There are some jobs that few, if any, would enjoy (for example, collecting rubbish, processing sewage, dangerous work, etc.). So how would an anarchist society deal with it?

[…]

It would be easy to imagine a free community sharing such tasks as fairly as possible between a community’s members by, for example, allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do. This would soon ensure that it would be done, particularly if it were part of a festival or before a party. In this way, every one shares in the unpleasant as well as pleasant tasks (and, of course, minimises the time any one individual has to spend on it). Or, for tasks which are very popular, individuals would also have to do unpleasant tasks as well. In this way, popular and unpopular tasks could balance each other out. Or such tasks could be rotated randomly by lottery. The possibilities are many and, undoubtedly, a free people will try many different ones in different areas.

[…]

Of course, no system is perfect – we are sure that not everyone will be able to do the work they enjoy the most (this is also the case under capitalism, we may add). In an anarchist society every method of ensuring that individuals pursue the work they are interested in would be investigated. If a possible solution can be found, we are sure that it will. What a free society would make sure of was that neither the capitalist market redeveloped (which ensures that the majority are marginalised into wage slavery) or a state socialist “labour army” type allocation process developed (which would ensure that free socialism did not remain free or socialist for long).

In this manner, anarchism will be able to ensure the principle of voluntary labour and free association as well as making sure that unpleasant and unwanted “work” is done. Moreover, most anarchists are sure that in a free society such requirements to encourage people to volunteer for unpleasant work will disappear over time as feelings of mutual aid and solidarity become more and more common place. Indeed, it is likely that people will gain respect for doing jobs that others might find unpleasant and so it might become “glamorous” to do such activity. Showing off to friends can be a powerful stimulus in doing any activity.

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- jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do. Ok, this basically sums up the answer: the community forces labor one way or another. What is the enforcement, carrot vs. stick for making people do their fair share. How do you reward people for doing unwanted work? How do you deal with someone refusing to do it, or “maliciously complying” and doing it terribly to make the job easier and/or get out of doing it again in the future?
  
  So the agreement is that there is work that needs some external impetus to happen, because not every job has enough people intrinsically interested or civic minded to make it happen. The question becomes which solutions manage to be more fair than others? For unskilled and unwanted jobs, the current answer has a lower class overworked because they are the most desperate, and that’s bad. A forced labor system might manage to distribute the burden more fairly, though thanks to people being crap it’s likely for a system set up to do that to be abused to overwork some demonized demographic, ending in a similar outcome a different way.
  
  Whatever the case is, it’s not as rosy as “people freely work on wikipedia and programming, therefore people will freely work on anything society may want or need”
  
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  - bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I’m absolutely against both wage slavery and forced labor. The point of this post is that people are willing to work on things without the profit motive, so we can structure society in a way that the work that needs to get done still gets done without any exploitation necessary.
    
    I’m an anarchist - if you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it’s almost definitely nothing like what you think. I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism makes inevitable.
    
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    jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    It said right in your quote that people do work that “no one volunteers to do”. If they aren’t volunteering, then something is providing the impetus.
    
    Broadly the writing avoids the more difficult nuance of how the community gets unplesant work to be “shared” when no one volunteers. This suggests enforcement one way or another.
    
    At small scale of a commune, some pretty human interactions can probably serve to drive this in a pretty reasonable way, by instilling sense of duty and comradery and potentially shame inherent to everyone knowing everyone else in a nuanced way. As you scale up, when inevitably people start losing track of each other, those soft mechanisms deteriorate, and the systems start to develop cracks for exploitation. Capitalism breaks in some ways, other systems break down in others. Fundamentally human behavior when interaction becomes diluted at scale tends to suck.
    
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