Hacker News Reader

Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

I know it seems crazy on its face. And I'm sure those leftists you refer to didn't have a coherent concept of how such a system would actually work. There's no way we could just replace paychecks today with rations and social credits and have a functioning system. It'd be an extreme destabilizing change to a system we built incrementally over a long time to be self reinforcing. But I also have the view that people are very malleable and can conform to all sorts of social structures and belief systems.

View on HN

I like to think about how this works at smaller scales. When there is an office full of people all being paid about the same and (critically) where they all want and care about the same outcome, the shit jobs will get done. I have often called myself a "code janitor" since I clean up shit that was left behind. It's not because I didn't want to be working on fun greenfield projects but because it was shit that just needed to get done. So I did it. And so did others.

Another example to play around with is when you go camping with friends. There's some shit work that just needs to be done. People pitch in. The same with staying at a friends house or a vacation rental with friends. Or cleaning leaves off of the storm drains. We all do this sort of work because it makes our lives better. If literal shit was piling up in front of my house I would probably shovel it even if it took 8 hours.

Natural disasters are also examples where people do work for free without expectation of compensation. I think people are more like that than what happens in apocalyptic novels (even though I love reading them).

Seems like the key shared characteristic of these examples are small communities where people care about each other. As you say, it works at smaller scales. But free rider problems are a lot tougher in a community of millions or more.

I live in one of those communities (eco village in Australia) and all it takes is one old haggard lady to reduce the workforce to nothing, as no one wants to put up with her abuse.

I think one thing people keep forgetting is that all these problems have already been solved for hundreds and thousands of years. You will never reduce inequality, abuse, pain, suffering. It's much better to contribute and improve what we already have rather than to rip it out and try "yet another variation of the same utopia that we've all been thinking about".

Build towards it, not "start again "

>"But I also have the view that people are very malleable and can conform to all sorts of social structures and belief systems."

This is another view common to most (Marxist) communists, the belief in society's ability to cultivate the 'socialist man'.

Okay, so are you disputing what I said? Various disparate religions and ideologies have cultivated adherents with notable success across history -- not least among them is free-market capitalism.

It's less of a belief and more of an emergent property of liberty and maths

You seem smart and it always amazes me how popular communist concepts are with smart people on HN.

Didn't you have some assigned group projects in school? Perhaps some people are easily satisfied by carrying the burden of other people who they don't know and who don't appreciate them, but I'd wager a ridiculously high majority of value producers would not be. Humans are social animals, but we're individuals first and foremost and self-interest will always be the best motivator.

Is there some future where humans are engineered to be satisfied with a predefined role and purpose, amongst other traits? Sure. But until we get to that point, commune-style living is an absolute dud.

By the way, I recommend you visit and try living in an actual commune. My girlfriend told me it was the most disgusting living situation she's ever seen.

I think people misunderstood where I was coming from a bit. To be clear, I wasn't commenting in support of communism, or against rewarding merit, or against rewarding merit with money. Status in life and legacy in death are still motivators that matter, though, and with the right set of shared values, they are powerful.

We still generally have a culture in the US of respecting our veterans and service members, for example. There is some social value in serving that's not material. If there wasn't, the material benefits would need to be more substantial.

Respect for military is probably well aligned with instinct though— I’m guessing most tribes have respect for their warriors. Can we repeat this for an arbitrary behavior that is not so aligned? Maybe, maybe not?

Even this is not a fair comparison IMO because even people who don’t mind carrying the majority of the work eventually often get tired and frustrated with this and in my experience this tends to happen at a similar rate to when they enter their most productive years.

There's lots of kibbutz (communes) in Israel. Apparently most aren't too bad. The one I visited seemed decent. But Jewish culture has a pretty strong community ethic which is key.

I also visited a couple of Greek Orthodox monasteries and they were not just nice but beautiful. So for small scale communities with a strong cultural binding "communes" can totally work. It doesn't scale though.

For some issues around this, also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis and the "Decline and restructuring" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

Reply on news.ycombinator.com