Under capitalism, a lot of the time, highly dangerous jobs are also highly paid. Kind of a balance that the individual decides to engage with. Same idea behind getting an advanced degree in STEM or law. I think of my job by example, I’m a power plant operator at a large combined cycle plant. No fucking shot I’d be doing this if the pay wasn’t good. I’m around explosive and deadly hot shit all day.
Under Maoism or Stalinism, aka the dictatorship of the dictator pretending to act for the proletariat? You are ordered to do it, for your own good and the good of the Party. If you don’t follow orders, you just get shot; and your family is put in a prison camp, your children raped and beaten and forced to labor.
Under real stateless, classless communism? Nobody knows, because that hasn’t existed yet. Anyone claiming to know exactly how it might operate is talking out of their hat. Marx is pretty clear on that.
This is a caricature of how socialism has functioned. In socialist states, people were compensated for their labor, and necessities were heavily subsized or otherwise free.
To the contrary of your depiction, the USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union. This expansion in humanitarianism actually carried onto the judicial system, documented by Mary Stevenson Callcott in Russian Justice, written in 1935.
Reducing the tremendous gains made by socialist countries to the whims of Stalin or Mao is extremely reductive. It means every single victory gained by the working classes, such as free healthcare and education, massive literacy campaigns, huge increases in equality among the sexes, and more were in fact the exclusive whims of their leadership. It also reduces all of their problems, struggles, and flaws to personal failings of their leadership.
This kind of analysis is very flawed, and gets in the way of analyzing what went right and what went wrong in existing socialism. Simply painting a prettier picture of socialism in our heads and rejecting all existing socialist projects for not measuring up to that picture means we will be hopeless when we run into similar problems when we ourselves begin building socialism.
“Dictatorship of the dictator” lol anything’s possible when you make shit up kiddo
I mean, there was a time before states and classes were invented.
Yeah, where the dangerous job was “hunt something so you don’t starve”, the motivation for doing the dangerous job is pretty obvious.
Not if you live in any kind of group. “Why should I go hunt? You do it.” And then I get excluded from the group - that could still happen.
(I’m spitballing, I know nothing about anything, just interested bystander)
If you’re interested, you could look it up.
Here’s a quick start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urgesellschaft
I genuinely appreciate the shithead responses. Thats how I handle threads a lot of the time too.
Not meant purely as shithead responses. I can’t contribute anything substantial to the discussion but I’m interested, so I’m throwing out random thoughts to bits and pieces and trying not to sound like I consider myself an authority on anything.
You are describing shit head responses.
Yeah, let’s go ask the cavepeople of 30,000 years ago how they handled dangerous industrial jobs in a communist country.
That’s a different topic, isn’t it? I was responding specifically to the notion that a stateless and classless society has never existed.
When was this time when they never existed? A state is just a government and last time I checked anthropology pushed that back to family-ish tribes. Classes are basically tiers and you can see related splits in some family units. I think you’re either going back to monkeys, or romanticising
Both “state” and “class” have specific definitions that were developed at some point. Of course you can find similar structures anywhere living things are coexisting, that doesn’t mean they meet the common conceptions of “state” and “class”.
Agreed. But it sounds like you care about the time before these mechanisms occurred and then my argument is that they have similar mechanisms that trace back further than the specific terms you’re using
Yes, generally outside the context of civilization though. Combining stateless and classless with civilization is the hard part.