“But which servant will be there to bring me my footstool when there are no longer nobles?” The people would collectively do the work that matters most, rather than shoving servile roles onto a lower class.

“But without the threat of unemployment, why would anyone do anything?” Human societies were communal before they were capitalist and for much longer. The closest parallel in modern day is how (some) families still act, doing things more on a basis of duty and shared responsibility toward the health and wellbeing of the family rather than looking at it like monetary cost and payoff.

We can look at the sense of security China has nurtured for a glimpse at how this kind of thing works: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11447997

Combination of material changes and culture enforce/reinforce a mindset that makes for a safer environment for most people. And this is with China not even being at the stage of development the question is about, yet it still has substantial, noticeable differences compared to the capitalist norm.

Incidentally, one thing I remember coming across in trying to learn Chinese is that the word they tend to use for the equivalent of “everyone” in English is 大家 (which literally translates to “big family”). Ain’t that telling? We don’t have to only imagine, we can look at the successes of AES states for glimpses of what developed communism would look like.

The problem with capitalism-brained people asking these questions is they are essentially asking, “What if individualism and idealism (the current superstructure) with communist societal organization (a future base)? How would this be sustainable?” They are right to be confused when they mash it together like that, but it’s not how societal changes happen and it’s one of the pivotal reasons that transition is such an important concept in ML. We know the current way of thinking and behaving will not change immediately. There is a process of getting there and AES states are living proof that it’s possible to make progress on it!

The question “how would communism look like / function” (which is what your question boils down to) is the most difficult one because the correct Marxist answer is “we don’t know”. We cannot predict the future.

However, we can theorize based on current conditions. To answer “why would people work for free” we can look at volunteer work, of which there are so many! People volunteer to write wiki pages, make mods for games, but also to work at soup kitchens or community gardens. There are several aspects to why people volunteer. It might be fulfilling creatively, or they might be community expectation around this work. If you lived with others im sure you had to do a round of chores.

So this is how I see work in a communist society. People do it because it is either fulfilling or there are certain community expectations around it.

I make coffee and tea for my family and friends for free all the time.

I feel like this kind of thinking presupposes that people are naturally lazy leeches who won’t put in work unless a sword is hanging over their head. How did people in hunter gatherer societies do their part without the incentive of per berry payment? This kind of reactionary thinking is sort of Thatcherite. The willingness to work or lack thereof is not immanent to human neurobiology. It is a product of the culture and society.

Regarding how the economy and supply chains will be organised, it is important to keep in mind classless communism is only expected in a very very advanced stage of societal development. This hard to foresee but not entirely pointless to ruminate about. Not being able to imagine a better world doesn’t mean that a better world is not possible. If you take an example of a less fun job like garbage collection, there are various possibilies. It’s possible that the technological advancements have made manual garbage collection obsolete. Or that maybe you are provided equipment that makes it safe, you work for 6 hours in a day and free for the rest to do as you please, not having to worry about rent, medical costs, paying your kid’s tuition etc. Either way it won’t be like manual scavenging in today’s India.

“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?”

Work still needs to happen. This takes coordination and organisation. Production is still required but people won’t live in a class based society.

The modern world produces way more complicated things than a cup of coffee. People are still going to own personal possessions under communism. They just aren’t going to be able to charge someone else rent to use their stuff.

Even in a classless, stateless, moneyless society, people can still get together and organize themselves, make plans, assign tasks, assign roles, reward or recognize individuals for extraordinary achievements while reprimanding and correcting individuals whose actions (or inaction) damage the collective. It doesn’t mean everyone just does what they want with no regard to the interests of the whole society.

What’s important to remember is that we don’t believe that these conditions can be achieved overnight. The whole point of the period of socialist construction under the dictatorship of the proletariat is not just to create the material base for communism but also the human base. This means instilling in the people values of community and solidarity and collective action while unlearning the individualism, egoism and greed of capitalist society. This new culture is then reinforced through positive incentive structures which reward social and collaborative behavior, in a diametrically opposite way to how capitalism teaches and rewards anti-social, exploitative, “every man for himself” behavior.

Wingnut Dishwashers Union - Jesus Does the Dishes

Who does the dishes after
the revolution well
I do my own dishes now
I’ll do my own dishes then
if we can’t love without dishwashers
how could we live without cops

While I cannot exactly answer everything about communist society, I will say that this question from your friend (seemingly not Marxist, I might add) is a bit strange: Do they think people just do not do things unless they wage or profit incentive?

I would imagine (again, I have not studied this part of communism) that under communism, there would be people who would want to do some of the things you mentioned because there would actually be a sense of community under communism (no class divisions means that there will be no exploiter-exploited relationship to divide people), and people would not need an “incentive” (if we mean incentive in the context of money being given so that people can do things) to provide services or do anything productive (hell, the wage incentive existing does not prevent people from helping others out despite it not being related to their wages).

In fact, profit gets in the way of incentives for doing productive things because it is only productive insofar as it relates to profit. If there is no profit, nothing productive in a given field is likely to be done. Eliminating classes would eliminate the fetters of capitalism on people in doing the things that they want to do, but they would also be able to better help out their community.

I think of it like this: Under capitalism, class divisions created in society not only cause them to experience capitalism differently, but feel the effect of things (like trash buildup) differently due to their different economic statuses causing some to experience the same situation differently or different experiences to exist entirely. The out-of-touch capitalists know little and care little about trash buildup in an impoverished neighborhood if they do not have to go there and if it does not serve as an anti-profit obstacle, so they would have no reason to pay others to clean it up (even if they pay others to clean up trash, others are cleaning up the trash, not them, so they will not understand the severity of the problem). On the other hand, if no class distinctions existed, people would have different roles but would experience similar environments (if they live in the same approximate area), and if something negatively affected a community, then there would be no “shield” from it in the form of capitalist privileges and no distancing from the problem because a negative thing affecting a community would affect all members of a classless society in a roughly equal manner (of course, I only mean roughly, because other factors would certainly affect the relative desire of any given person to provide a service to the community, but it will be less of a factor than it would under capitalism).

Sorry for the answer not explaining all aspects of the question, but your friend does not seem to understand that people do not stop doing things because of no classes existing.

when the same question gets asked “Who will scrub toilet under communism” I’m always there to pitch in and say that I would. I love maintenance and janitorial work, but they do not pay me enough to survive.

Spectre of

Ah wait whoops this is actually a serious question

we are never going to return to this state of affairs before capitalism of communal farming societies with no profit motive. still humans have always tended to like to fill their days with things. it’s also that automation resolves a lot of the need for different types of labour, service sector too, but voluntary labour for things like cooking, art, etc. exist right now and many people will flourish without the need to divert their energy into other things in this, admittedly abstract and not uet real, conception of a communist society. as star said we don’t know for certain, but it’s silly to pretend like that’s really going to negate anyone’s willingness to do things for the heck of it. we do it now in a society entirely centered on capital and people express all the time how they want to if not for that need.

Others have given great responses, but I’ll simply add that the process of communism is in achieving a society where the products of labor are distributed based on need, along a common plan. Gradually formations we think of as natural today will likely be phased out, and we cannot concretely predict what will take their place. Automation will cover most menial tasks, and what remains for humans to do will eventually be what humans enjoy doing, which requires building the necessary productive forces for such a society.

The soviet union had cafeterias.

If you look towards history, this question has been asked many times:

• In slave societies, if you abolish slavery, who will do the harvest / work in mines / construction?
• In feudal society, if you abolish serfdom, why wouldn’t the serf just leave? How would the serf work to supply the Lord and the city with food and services?
• In capitalist society, why would anyone work without wages or profit incentive?

The reality is, when society changes, the material incentives for work also change. In slave society, the material incentive was violent coercion, in feudal society, the serf would be able to keep part of his work but would also be coerced through an oath to their Lord, in capitalism the worker is coerced through a wage and through the fear of unemployment.

In communist society, which now is only an idealized abstraction, society will have its own material incentives. But speaking of today, we do have blueprints for what could evolve in the next stage. We could all have a share on both in direct wage or in the capital accumulated, in case of cooperative enterprises. We could have an incentives based on goals and performance, as it happens in state owned companies. The wage system won’t disappear overnight, but wage is not necessarily a problem if you don’t have labor-capitalist social relations.

No coffee under communism. Stalin ate all the coffee beans.