We're all familiar with those Twitter threads about what job you'd want after the revolution. On the other hand, you may have run into those annoying Marxists that scoff at any discussion about communism and call you an adherent of Lassalle for having any vision for the future. Well thankfully the users on this website are quite a bit more chill, so I'd like to discuss what we can realistically infer about life under communism.
By communism, I mean the following: the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established, private property has been abolished, wage-labor has been done away with, the economy is centrally planned using labor-time, and these developments have occurred all over the world. That is to say, lower-stage communism, or the highest development of socialism that is technically possible in the present or near-future.
Here is what I have considered so far. I can elaborate if the logic doesn't make sense, and obviously criticism is fine as long as you're not a Redditor about it.
- The end of economic depressions - well honestly you can do this and still keep the capitalists :some-controversy:
- The end of unemployment/reserve army of labor
- Higher quality of life - most people will be paid more for their labor, abolition of profit means less appropriation of surplus value (still need to do this for capital investment and taxes), abolition of private property and inheritance will mean more resources for the social commonwealth
- The disappearance of anti-immigrant sentiment - there would be no downward pressure on wages, and the increase of labor to the social pool that results from immigration would be more directly beneficial to the average person than it is now (that said, most causes of immigration would disappear and also there could theoretically be resource constraints)
- Increased productivity - the higher cost of labor will increase automation, drive down prices, and lower the amount of necessary labor
- Automation - capitalism can only exist by extracting surplus value, which you cannot do to machines; thus automation can only be completed under communism
- More big projects - long-term, capital-intensive projects are usually avoided by capitalists although the state sector of some capitalist governments sometimes picks up the slack; we could expect more (1000 nuclear power plants, nuclear fusion, high speed rail, etc)
- The end of many diseases - China kept COVID-19 at bay for 3 years but a communist Earth probably could have eradicated it with quarantines
- Sustainability - capitalism pretty obviously cannot fix the metabolic rift but if we get rid of profit then theoretically it's possible
Weird