I work in a water treatment plant that serves 450,000+ people. The job is a bit repetitive; rotating shifts 7 days in a row at a time, occasional 16-hour days, and working most holidays. It is not a hard job, but not at all glamorous. My job is to conduct routine analyses of the water to make sure it is up to our and the EPA’s standards of quality. I do a major set of tests every 2 hours and a smaller set every hour in between. Part of each major set involves a rather long walk to the settling basins (where all the crap in the water is settled out) to get samples. While on one of my walks in the wee-hours, I realized that I just might be doing some of that dirty work that opponents of socialism claim would not get done if we were not paid for it. Come to think of it, the same could be said for the maintenance workers, plumbers, electricians, secretaries, and operators that work here too. We all do the dirty work, rain, snow or shine, so that almost half a million people have clean water to drink. Sure we don’t “clean the sewers”, but we have the option of transferring into that job if we need to! Some of these people, including me, like our jobs. We take pride knowing that we are providing a valuable service to the community, not slaving away making some other person rich. We hate taking orders from politicians whose primary concerns are money and the finished product.
Would some of us choose other work if allowed to in a different society? Probably. Would some of us stay? Undoubtedly. There are a lot of people who already do the dirty work simply because it is necessary – they sure as hell are not getting rich doing it. In fact, much of what we consider dirty work would reduce or disappear when we no longer live in a society hell-bent on consumption and permeated with the attitude that someone else is getting paid to clean up our messes. However, a lot of it will still be very necessary in a free access society, and not easily done by robots or other technological advancements. In any case, even if there weren’t enough people to step forward to treat the water, collect the trash, clean the sewers and fix the roads, these responsibilities would have to be shared by the people in general or they just wouldn’t get done. How long would you let your house lapse into a primitive and unhealthy state before you got up and did something about it? You don’t get paid for that, but it still gets done (or you suffer the consequences). Sure, the proverbial “slackers” could probably avoid it, but they wouldn’t make too many friends or get much help from others in the long run – making an anti-social existence in a social society even less desirable that the dirty work itself! So socialism doesn’t have to worry about people doing the dirty work anymore than we have to worry about people brushing their teeth or mowing the lawn. We know we will be able to count on each other because socialism will be built upon bedrock of cooperation, and not forcing certain wage slaves to clean up after the rest of us. Yeah, real socialism is all about people stepping up to get the dirty work done, together.
-Virgo
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