Employment doesn’t have to be exploitative.

Yeah. I’m not saying that no positions can be filled by volunteers or people working for feel-good rather than profit motive… but it’s a lot easier to find people willing to do novel research or development than it is to find someone to keep the plant chilled water systems running, or to build the pumps for the plant.

I have usually seen this argument applied as saying that we’re post scarcity now and that if we just gave everyone UBI, you’d be able to fill all the jobs you actually need with volunteers today, and just ‘get rid of’ the unnecessary/wasteful consumer goods.

Yeah, if you centrally applied resources to fields that actually needed it rather than profitable fields, that would in some ways be great. Ads would basically die overnight, for starters.

There’s a small proportion of the population that loves what they do - and more would if you were able to get rid of middle management. A good part of the reason volunteer projects tend to be successful is that they’re almost entirely composed of people who completely believe in the project.

Are you going to find a few thousand people in the same area who really believe in building great quality drugs/aircraft/electrical cables/plastic pipe when their job is mostly repetitive labour?

I’ve worked a fair bit of construction. There’s a feel-good factor for certain kinds of projects, but at the end of the day you’re installing stuff. Are we going to be able to build, staff, and maintain a semiconductor fab, a pharma factory, or an aircraft/engine assembly line with volunteers? What about the wire/steel/pump factories that make the bits used to build the building?

Part of how we’ve got to record low levels of e.g. aircraft fatalities is meticulous documentation (certain issues notwithstanding), procedures, and double/triple checking. And no-one really wants to be QA for long, or have QA watching over them like a hawk, especially when it’s both.

Replacing some of these roles with AI/robots doesn’t necessarily help that much. AI is bad at meticulous paperwork. So are unenthusiastic people.

Firefighting is probably one of the best fields to attract volunteers to. Save lives, glamorous, awesome PR, play with cool ‘toys’. Downside is danger but there’s enough people for whom that’s an upside.

Does that mean they’re all/mostly trainable, stick around long enough to justify the training, and willing to put in the work even when it comes to more mundane tasks like training, cleaning, equipment overhaul, drying pipes etc?

I believe most places have both paid and volunteer firefighters and I imagine it’s for a reason.

You’re missing the point: that benefactor doesn’t pay the people that contribute to the server.

I love saying nothing in combobulated ways.

I would personally prefer the hands-on labor of garbage collection to a desk job, provided good working conditions and treatment like a human being are included.

If it weren’t for the pay difference, I’d certainly prefer garbage man. A huge percentage of kids want that job before the economy crushes their dreams. It’s cool!

Nothing wrong with that. I became organized on a socialist organization mostly thanks to social media propaganda.

If I buy a bunch of seeds, plant them, grow a bunch of vegetables, and sell the vegetables for more than the price I paid for everything (seeds, fertilizer, tool wear and tear, and any other expenses related to the garden), I have made a profit. It doesn’t come at the expense of anyone.

It wouldn’t be fair to insist I sell the vegetables at exactly the cost of everything I put into them. I put my own labour into growing them and bringing them to market. If I couldn’t profit by selling them then I wouldn’t sell them, I’d just eat them myself or not even bother growing them at all.

Depends how you define “expense”. A good service provided at a fair price, all stakeholders benefit. My CSA share of a farmers produce gives me cheap, quality veggies and gives the farmer consistent cash flow regardless of disease/weather/whatever. We clearly both benefit. Someone else buying UPFs from Walmart because they have literally no other option to affordably feed their family in their neighbourhood… maybe not such a good deal for the consumer.

P.s. Profit is the value in excess of the cost of good sold, not over what the buyer values it as. In a “good” transaction (where the parties are transacting at parity, without monopolistic/exploitative practice) the price is less than the consumer would be willing to pay but still enough for the seller to be compensated for the risk and cost they took in buying/making and stocking the product.

There’s a lot of ways to make profit without exploiting others or hoarding private property of valuables and infrastructure that is needed by the needy.

You got some good examples in other comments.

My ultimate point is that the average Joe will still work for an income greater than what they had prior to the work. However, it’d be a true meritocracy and they couldn’t accumulate to a point of harming others, like the rich do today.

You know the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? Trade creates value because certain items are most valuable to certain people, and getting them where they’re most needed is a valuable service.

Profit can also be achieved without stealing from others via the creation valuable items. A finished product can be more valuable than its individual pieces and the time and skills used to create it.

Socialism and communism isn’t about abolishing production and trade, it’s about collectivising ownership of the means of production and its profit so that just a few people can’t eat up all of the profits.

Yes, you are right. Profit is surplus by definition. When we are talking about conducting our affairs under socialism, there is no such concept. If a business under socialism were to expand its operations through investment, that’s not profit.

You live in USSR year 1934

Not communism or socialism.
Congrats, you’ve been brainwashed.