Leftists want real jobs on the leftist commune

This is one of the most pedantic posts I’ve ever written.

Often, people complain that when leftists talk about what jobs they’d have on the leftist commune, they never say that they’re going to end up working real jobs that actually improve people’s lives. But this is just flat-out not true. For example, in a post I generally liked, Jeremiah Johnson recently made this complaint on Infinite Scroll, linking to this tweet:

But two of the three activities are jobs! Being a barista is a job! Making clothes is a job! To a first approximation, all work in preindustrial societies is producing either food or clothes!

The good people at r/fragilecommunism have collected a list of responses to this tweet. Since r/fragilecommunism is anti-communism, I assume that they’re cherrypicking the worst cases. But even so, the vast majority of people seem to want to be gainfully employed in real jobs. I counted jobs listed by tweets that aren’t obvious troll tweets, and the distribution is as follows:

farmer: 3
cook: 5
construction/manufacturing: 3
librarian: 2
handyperson: 1
textiles: 3
barista: 2
sex work: 3
childcare: 8
proofreader: 2
deliveryperson: 1
manual labor: 1
project management: 2
Not A Job: 11

This taxonomy overstates the case: most people wanted to work multiple jobs, so the vast majority of the people working Not A Job are also working a real job.

Besides, Jeremiah Johnson is a professional podcaster and Internet culture commentator, so I’m not sure where he gets off saying that teaching people about theory isn’t real work. Talking about Marcuse isn’t a real job, but posting about the cultural history of antifa is?

I do think there are real criticisms of fantasies about leftist communes. Most obviously, actually existing leftist communes suck.¹ In modern America, you have a level of freedom nearly unprecedented in human history to found and/or join the leftist commune of your choice. People mostly don’t, because leftist communes are terrible and they are genuinely much happier spending 35 hours a week slinging lattes.

I also think people are overestimating how much they’d enjoy their hobbies if they were jobs, or how much the suckage of their jobs is because of capitalism. It’s fun to play with and teach kids. It’s not fun to play with and teach kids for forty hours a week, even if you’re tired or sick or in a bad mood, because their parents are relying on you to get their own work done. It’s not fun to have to play with and teach kids with obnoxious personalities or whom you don’t get along with, because even children you dislike need someone to supervise them so they don’t fall off the slide and break their legs.² That’s what responsibility is: doing work even if you don’t want to.

Gardening is fun; farming isn’t. It’s not that capitalists ruined farming. It’s that, if you garden as a hobby, you only have to garden the ways you like and the amount you find enriching. If you or anyone else actually relies on the food from your garden, then you’ll need to do farming tasks you hate, because that’s the only way we’re going to have dinner.

Finally, while most of the jobs listed are real jobs, the distribution of jobs is batshit. Three sex workers?

This is actually a pretty deep criticism of leftist communes! Markets and prices are the greatest tool ever invented for aggregating information about people’s preferences into a list of goods and services. Markets aren’t perfect, of course: they inherently weight the preferences of the poor less than the preferences of the rich; they have no way of taking into account the preferences of people other than the buyers and sellers. But it is impossible for any single human being to track the needs of eight billion other humans—much less all the intermediate goods that we need to produce goods and services that fulfill those needs. No one knows how to make a pencil. You can’t run an advanced economy off hoping that by coincidence someone happens to have a passion for making ferrules.

To some extent, markets solve the problem of getting people to do things they don’t want to do. But people can be motivated in multiple ways: sincere care for others, social pressure, the threat of imminent starvation if the crops don’t come in. The problem markets solve isn’t primarily motivation; it’s information. How many people want leftist theory explained to them? I certainly don’t know. How many whiteboards, markers, PowerPoint projectors, pens, and packs of notepaper do people need to explain leftist theory? I don’t know that either. But in a market economy, if people want leftist theory, they will buy it; if a leftist needs colorful markers to explain that theory, they’ll buy them too. If you’d be equally happy explaining leftist theory, serving lattes, and making clothes, you’ll pick the job that pays the best, and thus that the most other people want. Leftist communes have no other way to resolve the information problem, which is a major reason they’re so poor.

I realize that this is a dumb, pedantic post. I agree that leftist communes are bad. But it matters what’s true. If you say “lol the only thing people want to do on the leftist commune is trauma-informed Tarot readings”, the people who want to do manual labor, take care of kids, sew clothes, or cook will decide (correctly) that you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you want to convincingly point out the real problems with leftist communes, you should argue with what people are actually saying, and not with the more convenient version of their viewpoint that you made up inside your head.

1. One of my friends says, “my job on the leftist commune is being shot for revisionism.”

2. Yes, some children are obnoxious and you have personality conflicts with some kids, because children are people and some people are obnoxious and no one gets along with 100% of non-obnoxious people.