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This was a question or rather a series of questions I heard over the weekend as I was discussing Marxism, class, labour etc. with a friend and I frankly couldn't really answer their questions. So here I am again asking it because this community provides incredible answers <3

The discussion was about work and their question was: "If class is abolished in communism and the people are taken care of, why would anyone work at all? Who is going to work in coffee shops, pick up trash, work in stores etc.? What would be the incentive for people to do anything productive?" I did my best saying that those jobs would still exist, but I kind of fumbled the argument.

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[-] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 3 days ago

Class won't be abolished, but the structure of class society will be such that it leads to its own negation, which ostensibly for the proletariat is no class at all. The difference implies a gentler slope than "no more class" (a mistake Kruschev committed as we know), and also situates us in history: the aristocracy did not get abolished per se, there were laws and some were executed but we see that the people composing this class eventually became old money bourgeois. They followed the order of the day and stopped complaining.

With this in mind we can place communism back as a continuous process, just like the transition from feudalism to capitalism was a long process with setbacks and uneven development - there are some countries that went from bourgeois rule back to aristocratic rule (France is a famous example), and others that are still technically monarchies today, with varying degrees of recognizing the power of the monarch. They ask "why would anyone work at all", but have they seen the humanoid robots already doing work in China? This is who will work - for the most part. But that requires a society that has sufficient productive forces to actually make that happen in the first place. The robots don't come out of nowhere. There's no prescription that says communism has to happen in five years or it's revisionist and doesn't count. This is an idealist precept - on whose authority?

You'll still want meaning and experiences, and it's entirely plausible there will be community coffee shops just for people who want human contact and something to do, maybe 2 hours and then you go on with your day. Or maybe by then our ideas will have changed such that we will see human baristas as archaic and a late form of social torture. Who knows! Who even knows what job they will be doing 10 years from now, how can we assume the culture of a people we not only don't know, but don't even exist yet?

Either way, today in capitalism restaurants are notoriously difficult businesses to run and often go bankrupt or through new management (when a restaurant changes its name that's usually what happened). They don't make a lot of money especially in a world where people can't justify the luxury - and it is a luxury when they can cook at home. So who will make coffee in communism? Mate, getting your food served is already becoming extinct right now! (Maybe that's the true actually existing socialism lmao).

If they mean socialism then they can just look at how China does it and why their state structure as a DotP makes their system wholly different from our own even if on the surface it seems like capitalism (because you see, people in China go to work, and I also go to work!), but that would probably lead to an even deeper discussion explaining China's system and why it's qualitatively different from ours.

[-] LeninZedong@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 3 days ago

Do you mean that classes will not be abolished under communism? Also, would not the negation count as abolition anyways?

[-] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 3 days ago

Abolition implies that it will happen in one fell swoop; while there is a law of change happening in leaps (quantitative change turns to qualitative change, but needs to be helped along), it would be more accurate to call it transformation, sublation, etc.

[-] 6kb_@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 days ago

he made a statement so thoughtfully articulated even his opps cheered (online chud language to english: What a thouhtful use of language on your part that easily conveys the nuances of diamat)

[-] LeninZedong@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 days ago

I think the right term of "withering away", and I think abolition does imply a more anarchist line.

this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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