Imagine a world where everyone has their basic needs met; housing, food, drinking water, education, childcare, paid parental leave, healthcare, it's all taken care of unconditionally. Wouldn't that be great?
source: YouTube
Well, I think it would be great. No more poverty, no more stress over how to pay next month's rent, no hunger or homelessness and always access to a doctor, medicine or hospital when you need it. And did I mention no more stress? It would be fabulous. But most people I know don't agree. The first thing they ask, after I've painted this picture of Heaven on earth, is "why would anyone do any work if everything they need is provided for?" They seem to think that suddenly everyone would become lazy. Most people believe that if there's no punishment for not working, most people wouldn't work. I have always found that such a strange thing to believe. It's like the hard-line Christians who believe they get their ethics and morals from God and the Bible, and fear they would commit every sin known to mankind if they would ever lose their faith; if God doesn't exist, if there's no eternal punishment in the afterlife, why not rape, pillage and murder?
Somehow most people don't make the automatic connection between "everything is taken care of" and "we take care of each other". Because it's obvious that work has to be done, and a lot of it, if we want to have everyone taken care of. So there's the first answer to the question why we would still work; no one would have anything if we don't. Being part of a society where no one has to want for anything, means you also have to want for nothing. Being part of such a society would in itself be an incentive to work.
"Yeah, but I don't want some lazy scum to benefit from my sweat, blood and tears!" This argument is the same as "I don't want to pay taxes!", and it's just as dumb. All throughout human history we've produced more than we can consume; even in the stone age not everyone could work, but everyone had food. The elderly, the children and the caretakers were all fed by the produce of the able and available hunters and gatherers. It's only natural to take care of each other. It's natural to want to take care of each other. We've existed as a species for some 300,000 years, and only over the last 10,000 years have we forgotten about this fact. No person survives on their own, not back then and not now.
Under capitalism we've reversed that equation; everyone works for themselves now, and 99 percent of us do so under a handful of people who own all the means of production. Most people don't like their work. They sacrifice their time only because they have to, or else they won't eat. In fact they work to eat and to make someone else rich. So they don't feel engaged with the work at all; they're alienated from their work. And that's a big problem when one third of your time is spent at work. This become worse when you realize that so much of that work is unnecessary; we overproduce so much. There's more food than there are mouths to feed, more empty buildings than there are homeless people. Who doesn't have one or more unused mobile phones in a drawer somewhere and how many recharge cables have you spent on them?
Most scarcity under capitalism is manufactured to keep up prices; what if profits and growth weren't the sole objectives of our economy? We would save time, energy, resources and so much more. And going back to the end-goal of a society in which we take care of each other, we wouldn't have to work nearly as much as we do now, especially if we divided all the work between all the people who are willing and able to work. And I believe that would be almost everyone, especially when the means of production are owned by everyone. People don't like their jobs because they don't have a say in their jobs. One third of their time is spent at a place where the're told what to do, how to do it, sometimes even how long they're allowed to visit the bathroom. If we work for each other, at a place that's owned by all who work there, these decisions would be made in a democratic way. We would be engaged with the work, the workplace and our colleagues, much more than we are now anyway.
And maybe, if we advance enough with automation, technology and artificial intelligence, the day will come when we don't have to work at all. I believe that even then we'll still want to work. We like to do things, to create things, to improve things, to improve our lives. Not just our own, but everyone's. We'll never get that chance under capitalism though; not when all the machines, robots and AI are in the hands of a few, not if we make ourselves extinct by ruining the planet for the sole benefit of a few, and not if we do so in wars we fight for a few. That's not going to work in the long run. That'll have to end, out of necessity.
There are a lot more answers to the question why anyone would work in a socialist society. Yes, what I've described here is basically socialism, communism even. But those are scary words... Give it another name if you like, but it's no a stretch to imagine a world like this. Not for me at least, and I've worked all my life. Well, at least since I got my first summer job at age 15, and I've never stopped working. This blog is just something I do on a side because I like to write and to pour my thoughts into unsuspecting people's minds ;-) Here's a video explaining some more reasons why we would still work; I just wanted to add the main reasons it missed, most important among which is the fact that we do take care of each other and we do like to take care of each other because it's been the story of our success as a species for hundreds of thousands of years.
Why Would Anyone Work Under Socialism?
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