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what if?
(files.catbox.moe)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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We will do it because we benefit ourselves from having this infrastructure. Certainly the people who first conceived of these systems were passionate about sewer maintenance, no?
The difference is we will not need to coerce people into working 8 or 12 hour shifts, so we would also have more time to devote to other interests and become more well-rounded individuals than we are under capitalism. We see things like sewer maintenance as undesirable drudgery because of how that work manifests under our current system.
You're thinking about all this from a capitalist point of view, in which we have to be coerced into being productive. You're failing to see this through the lens of an actual anarchist/communist society. You assume the same inequities would just carry over. The whole point is to eliminate these hierarchies altogether.
And yes, I do think people would be willing to do these things. I'm not above it myself.
I don't subscribe to this cynical view of human nature, nor do I subscribe to the belief that hierarchies are natural or inevitable. Even the classic example of hierarchies in nature -- wolves -- only exhibit hierarchical behavior in captivity. Moreover, we are uniquely intelligent animals who don't need to be bound by the same shortcomings that lesser intelligent animals exhibit instinctually.
Hierarchies are certainly not desirable and create more problems than they are able to solve.
The resentment you described is also a product of our current system and is the very sort of thing that anarcho-communism would address, and which state-based systems and capitalism invariably fail to do and even exacerbate.
This is not to say there would not be people with specific training, expertise, experience, and interests. For instance, I wouldn't see a piano tuner to treat a gaping wound. One false assumption I often see people make is that expertise = hierarchy, which is simply not true.
Also consider that the nature of infrastructure may look different than what we have now. Many of our current models are highly wasteful and inefficient.
No one expects any of this to happen overnight by the way.
If you're really interested, I found this to be an excellent read and surprisingly easy to grasp, even for someone like me: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread
You can honestly just scroll to the sections that concern you. I had many of the same concerns that you had, but the more I read, the more I see how this could really work. (I'm not a political expert by the way, so I may not be describing all this as well as someone else could. I've also been trying to learn more about anarcho-primitivism, which has its own answers to these questions. Regardless, I think most of us agree that the current system is bad, so we're looking for better alternatives.)
There is a gap between conceiving a system and maintaining it. Sure, there are architects who conceived sewers. But I doubt they went inside to maintain it on a regular basis.