3 Jan 2021

claudeb: A white cat in purple wizard robe and hat, carrying a staff with a pawprint symbol. (Default)

There are two interesting critiques of Communism in sci-fi.

One is in The Disposessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin. It’s about a distant planet where the Communists, instead of making a revolution, ran off to their moon (which is really big, more like Mars). They solve the problem of “who takes out the trash” by having absolutely everyone take turns, without exceptions. And the protagonist is all, “look, it’s kind of hard for me to be a brilliant scientist working to improve everyone’s lives when I have to stop all the time and spend a few weeks working as a garbage man”. The point being, sure, it has to be done, and it’s fair to share the burden, but that has to have limits.

(No seriously, imagine a surgeon having to personally wash the operating room spotless before being able to bring in the patient.)

A similar take can be found in The Doomed City, a novel by the Strugatsky Brothers. There everyone is rotated between jobs at regular intervals. A manager can always end up a janitor and the other way around. Which is good up to a point because everyone learns a little of everything and gets to know how everyone else lives. But ultimately it causes more problems than it solves because everyone is better at some jobs and terrible at others, but they have to switch anyway. In fact one of the main characters prefers to be a garbage man: a humble, low-key job that helps everyone but doesn’t put pressure on him. And he has to feint the system to stay where he’d rather be, at increasing peril to himself, while people who proved themselves as good managers must abandon their posts to be a sales clerk or whatever for a while.

That was the big problem with Communism, you see: much like Capitalism, it was deeply inhumane, treating people like cogs in a machine. “From each according to their abilities.” Measured how? “To each according to their needs.” Determined by whom?

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claudeb: A white cat in purple wizard robe and hat, carrying a staff with a pawprint symbol. (Default)
Claude LeChat

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