I really appreciated Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, where he discusses how factories may, if the incentives were different, actually be quite pleasant places to work. If the factory needs to produce product but is open to anyone working at it, some folks will take the time to improve lighting, reduce noise and pollution, step in and take shifts, and generally try to make it nice to be there.
Not everyone will do this, but some folks are just wired to want to help in that way. The thing is that we don't have a financial incentive to do that today -- you must optimize your factory ruthlessly for production efficiency rather than for comfort.
I believe that rewards for excess work are similar -- some of us cannot put the work down, we enjoy doing it. I think those cases will largely fall into one of a few buckets:
1) Some folks will just do extra work and not be bothered that they are doing more. (I tend to fall into this bucket -- my needs are met, I do it because I derive value in the labor)
2) Some folks will divert their excess labor from production to a hobby, art, or other projects (like the factory comfort). It might not mean more widgets, but maybe we have enough widgets. If you make everyone around you happier, rewards will find you.
3) Some folks will want more luxuries, and we'll have to figure out if and how to allocate those things. Not everyone can work excess. If I lost a hand due to a workplace accident, but I'm otherwise eager to work, do I deserve less than someone who is equally eager but able bodied? I believe many Capitalists would say yes, but many Socialists would say no.
4) We'll have to recognize work that isn't considered 'work' today. Parenting, for instance, requires an immense amount of labor. Laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, elder care, etc. Maybe we encourage productive folks to spend their excess time looking for ways to make that work easier.
5) Some folks aren't going to be happy. They are going to feel under-rewarded for their labor. Hopefully this is offset by generally higher wages/standard of living for most. (If we're not paying billions of dollars to CEOs, that's billions in the pockets of individual workers).
6) Some folks work excess today and see no increase in comp -- it's already a problem for salaried workers, even within Capitalism. I can work 40 hours or 60 hours, but my pay is the same either way. I might get a notional bonus of a few grand a year, I might get an earlier promotion. But those things certainly aren't guaranteed.
> we're not forcing people to pay for those that choose to not work.
What is work is a very, very important question. If someone is a stay at home parent, cooking and cleaning, is that work? If someone is a musician, but isn't a particularly great one, is that work? If I sit in the park and tell stories and people enjoy listening to me and I have a regular audience, is that work? If I'm an elder and mostly enjoy spending my remaining years with my loved ones, is that work?
Yes, we must have some level of productivity, obviously, in order to survive. I strongly suspect that if you gave people basic needs, nearly everyone would chip in some labor, but we'd also probably need to decide on some mechanism for "who performs sanitation if we do not get enough volunteers?" Today that mechanism is "you gotta eat, so you gotta work wage labor", but we could absolutely replace that with "least popular labor gets bonus luxuries" or "we all take turns, once a year you gotta collect trash".
All of those hypotheticals can be true, yet you'll still need to deal with people who consciously choose not to work or do much less work. Under Socialism these behaviors are encouraged because they are rewarded regardless. Under Capitalism these people pay the price themselves, whether that is fair or not, not only is it more unfair to have others pay for it, but at least it discourages people to a great extent.
> 1) Some folks will just do extra work and not be bothered that they are doing more
I doubt this for most people. This is basically saying that right now a lot of people are ok with a pay cut (same work, less pay = free extra work). I can see a lot of people doing #2, which is equivalent to not working. And as mentioned before, these people are not working yet still somehow rewarded for it.
#5 and #6 are true, and is why if everyone gets a living wage regardless of whether they work or not, the people who currently don't enjoy doing what they do would simply stop doing it. Maybe everyone would become some kind of artist, while machines keep the economy running, but that is a utopia that requires many technological breakthroughs, i.e. advanced AI, unlimited renewable energy, better batteries, etc... and we're not getting there without Capitalism, which is somewhat ironic.
> but we'd also probably need to decide on some mechanism for "who performs sanitation if we do not get enough volunteers?" Today that mechanism is "you gotta eat, so you gotta work wage labor", but we could absolutely replace that with "least popular labor gets bonus luxuries" or "we all take turns, once a year you gotta collect trash".
This is something that the market solves as if it where a large, decentralized computer. Without market incentives there needs to be top-down coordination to incentivize people and this becomes unmanageable and does not scale.
I still feel that there is a problem with markets in how success is exponential for an extreme minority, while seemingly impossible to attain for a large portion at the bottom. I'm not sure what the best approach to solve that is, but we cannot take the wealth markets produce and expect the same output for a system without markets. The wealth we have under markets is not attainable without it, even though some people exponentially get rich from it. While inequality between rich and poor is bad, having everyone be poor because nobody can coordinate their productivity is even worse. Personally, I feel once AI becomes powerful enough, we will be able to do this kinds of complicated coordination that may solve the problem, however that path is a minefield of potential dystopias.
Not everyone will do this, but some folks are just wired to want to help in that way. The thing is that we don't have a financial incentive to do that today -- you must optimize your factory ruthlessly for production efficiency rather than for comfort.
I believe that rewards for excess work are similar -- some of us cannot put the work down, we enjoy doing it. I think those cases will largely fall into one of a few buckets:
1) Some folks will just do extra work and not be bothered that they are doing more. (I tend to fall into this bucket -- my needs are met, I do it because I derive value in the labor)
2) Some folks will divert their excess labor from production to a hobby, art, or other projects (like the factory comfort). It might not mean more widgets, but maybe we have enough widgets. If you make everyone around you happier, rewards will find you.
3) Some folks will want more luxuries, and we'll have to figure out if and how to allocate those things. Not everyone can work excess. If I lost a hand due to a workplace accident, but I'm otherwise eager to work, do I deserve less than someone who is equally eager but able bodied? I believe many Capitalists would say yes, but many Socialists would say no.
4) We'll have to recognize work that isn't considered 'work' today. Parenting, for instance, requires an immense amount of labor. Laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, elder care, etc. Maybe we encourage productive folks to spend their excess time looking for ways to make that work easier.
5) Some folks aren't going to be happy. They are going to feel under-rewarded for their labor. Hopefully this is offset by generally higher wages/standard of living for most. (If we're not paying billions of dollars to CEOs, that's billions in the pockets of individual workers).
6) Some folks work excess today and see no increase in comp -- it's already a problem for salaried workers, even within Capitalism. I can work 40 hours or 60 hours, but my pay is the same either way. I might get a notional bonus of a few grand a year, I might get an earlier promotion. But those things certainly aren't guaranteed.
> we're not forcing people to pay for those that choose to not work.
What is work is a very, very important question. If someone is a stay at home parent, cooking and cleaning, is that work? If someone is a musician, but isn't a particularly great one, is that work? If I sit in the park and tell stories and people enjoy listening to me and I have a regular audience, is that work? If I'm an elder and mostly enjoy spending my remaining years with my loved ones, is that work?
Yes, we must have some level of productivity, obviously, in order to survive. I strongly suspect that if you gave people basic needs, nearly everyone would chip in some labor, but we'd also probably need to decide on some mechanism for "who performs sanitation if we do not get enough volunteers?" Today that mechanism is "you gotta eat, so you gotta work wage labor", but we could absolutely replace that with "least popular labor gets bonus luxuries" or "we all take turns, once a year you gotta collect trash".