Mucking out sewers, garbage collection, manually excavating Fatbergs:
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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Robots. The solution for the disgusting jobs nobody really wants to do is to build machines to do it.
Or, or perhaps until these jobs can be automated, or remotely performed, you incentivize people to do them by offering privileges. Perhaps luxury items, or vacations, etc. Or, perhaps you make it something everyone in the community has to take a turn doing. Like jury duty. Could still also incentivize it.
These are necessary albeit disgusting jobs that people should be praised for doing instead of looked down on like they often are. Garbage collectors, sanitation workers, janitors and the like are some of the most important work that someone can do.
Nursing, and Doctoring often entails just as disgusting of work as the aforementioned jobs. Some are only willing to do the work for the money. Some will always be willing to do it for the desire to help society, and the recognition they receive. As long as their fundamental needs and more are met, people will be willing to do disgusting jobs for the greater good.
You don't think people would volunteer to maintain sewers or collect garbage if the alternative was shit/trash everywhere?
To me it just looks like an easy way to do your community a service.
Unplugging your toilet?-> yes.
Unclogging a hot guy/gal's toilet?-> yes.
Unclogging an old gramma's toilet -> nah, I pass thank you!
Radio waves were thought to have no value, to the point that the person that discovered them thought so too.
Following this graph, we would never have radio, because it didn't have value. Which was true.
There's many things where something didn't have value but does later on. That's where this graph has a huge flaw.
Unless you want to extinguish all progressivism.
This graph also doesn't work at a large scale. Good luck figuring out food distribution logistics that everyone just accepts at a scale of even 200,000 people, let alone millions. "But just make an organization of volunteers that deals with that!" - congratulations, you just reinvented "government".
Unfettered Capitalism is extremely obviously not the answer, but neither is idealistic anarchism that at best works only with a smaller sizes community that does not rely on anything post-industrial era due to advanced complex logistical systems of creation. There needs to be a new system.
I agree that this is extremely simplified, however your radio example implies physicists only do physics for money and nobody would have explored the applications of radio waves without a profit motive which seems at odds with... Well, literally every scientist I've ever met.
Not necessarily. Just because someone at one time didn't think it had value, that doesn't mean nobody ever would think it didn't have value.
But nobody even likes twitter ☹️
I get the idea but there are several issues.
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Intermediate products. For example I've used many automatic measuring microscopes, so if a block was 25mm +/- 1mm it would find the edge of both sides and calculate the distance between them and determine if part was good. These systems are very expensive (cheap ones could buy a car, expensive ones could buy a house). It's useful but I don't think anyone would make it without a benefit to them personally. Technically I could do the same with a drop gauge or even a ruler but wouldn't be as accurate or as fast. In a lot of cases you don't need that, for example making utensils like forks or spoons. But for example making gears in a transmission have as tight if not tighter tolerances.
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Quanitity. Now let's make a house, yeah people might like the act of building. And we all agree houses are valuable, not monetarily but in shelter from weather and safety from animals and other humans. How many screws are in your house? If your answer is 3 digits you are wrong. Who is going to make all those screws? Now we are going to ignore machine screws which need a precise thread and just use wood screws. Do you think anyone's life dream is to make 10,000s of screws? If you find someone to make them, how are they going to feed their family over the months/years it will take them?
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Quality. Going back to screws they need accurate threading and accurate heads. Without accurate heads a screwdriver won't work(think of removing a stripped screw) and without accurate threads it won't screw down or mate with the drilled hole. Who is going to verify that? If you "buy" 1000 screws and only 50 are usable what do you do? With no incentive to make good screws does the screw maker care? Who is going to verify the food you get is safe to eat?
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Non-profit products. Let's say you love math. How are you going to survive? In history their were patrons who paid some of these people hoping there would be a reason in several years or decades. Some worked out, some didn't. But someone needed to say "yeah study how to solve that problem and I'll support you while you do". But they have limited resources too. In most cases these were basically investments hoping the end product would result in a net benefit. You can't survive with just math. You can't go into the woods and scream a theorum at a deer to get meat to feed your family. Now that math feeds into intermediate products which feed into final products which are valuable and that value gets distributed to all the earlier producers.
Yeah people like to make final products. Most people won't enjoy just sitting their useless. Some people like fixing/restoring stuff. But they use so so many stuff other people have done. Distribution is totally fucked up, granted. But for some people to do their dreams there are so many other people they rely on.
I'm gonna skip 1 and come back to it at the end
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yes I think there are definitely people willing to do a simple task to create things everybody needs (screws) to make things, plenty of people. the people who produce food and need screws (all of the food producers) will feed the screw makers' families. they have a very obvious incentive to keep their screw makers alive even if we're being superficial in the way capitalism has trained us to be (in an anarchist/communist/socialist society we don't feed and house and heal people based on how useful they are. we give them what they need because they deserve it because they're people, their existence makes them valuable and worthy of the things they need)
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no incentive to make good screws? what??? they're using those screws in their own house too!! you gotta be trolling tbh, what?? people making food will make sure it's safe to eat because they're eating it too!! in what universe is governmental oversight the only way to guarantee quality?
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people deserve the things they need to have to exist, just by simple right of them existing. "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs." there is more than enough food and housing in the world to feed and house everybody, the only reason we don't is the greed of the ruling class
ok back to 1, I think that people would still make these devices even if they owned the means of production but if they didn't that means that they were not valuable as the flow chart says
getting to part 2 I'm half convinced this is just trolling but I'll still post this in case it's not
Here’s the harder question that I haven’t seen satisfactorily answered by alternatives to markets:
How many screws should the screw-maker make?
With markets, the answer is that prices are the signal to make more/less screws. The screw-maker doesn’t need to know anything about the rest of society: when screw prices go up they make more screws. When they go down they make less.
Screws are not made by hand today, of course, they’re made by very large and expensive machines that can produce millions of screws per year. When the screw-maker wants to increase screw output but their machine is already at full capacity, they need to buy another machine (and perhaps even another building to house it). Needless to say, this is a very big decision that can’t be taken lightly, otherwise the screw-maker might go out of business.
In a non-market economy, how do decisions like this get made? The advantage of markets is that the decision-makers only need access to “local” information: that is, information about prices of screws and screw-making machines and other miscellaneous details related to the screw-making business. They don’t need to know how the entire economy works as a whole, something central planners do need to know if they’re going to decide for everyone how many screws need to be made.
This simple difference (information on a need to know basis) lets the screw-makers be experts at screw-making, and optimize their business in ways no central planning committee could ever hope to achieve.
How many screws should the screw-maker make?
They probably get asked every day for some screws. They are either capable to extrapolate this into a reasonable monthly goal or they ask for help from someone who is good at that. If they make a mistake and make not enough, than people who need screws will probably have to wait a little. And if they make to many, they can spend their time doing something else. Like where actually is the problem here? We dont need perfection in an anarchist society.
They could even create a guild or syndicate or something with other screwmakers to help each other out in materials, when one is unable to work, when a communities needs emergency screws etc.
And if screw making to meet everyones need is so shitty that nobody would want to do it, then everybody who is able to should do part of it and as a community think of a process that makes this possible and maybe even good by whatever metric they care about.
That may be fine in a village or a town or a small chain of towns, but I’m talking about the whole world. The screw-maker lives in China or Vietnam. They don’t speak English or even know which languages are spoken by their customers, yet they make screws used for building houses all over the world.
That’s the miracle of markets. There’s an old saying that “economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” It’s absolutely true, of course, but that’s really by design. Economists don’t concern themselves with the deep philosophical questions of human values. They’re mainly interested in answering the question “how much of X should be produced” and the theory of markets says that we don’t really know, but that the information flows through the communication of price information. In the absence of markets, this information needs to be replicated explicitly and the problem turns out to be way too complex.
Think about any manufactured object we use today, in the modern world: a car, a PC, a phone, a microwave, a dishwasher. These objects are made up of dozens to hundreds to thousands and even tens of thousands of parts, many of which are made by hundreds or even thousands of different companies connected together into supply chains that span countries and even continents.
No one at any of these companies actually knows how to do all the work of making everything that goes into the final product. None of them know how many of the parts will be needed in the future. All of them simply respond to changes in prices as they happen in real time, and fulfill orders from their direct customers (who may simply be middlemen).
It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle with millions of pieces being worked on by many people who don’t even know each other. No one knows what the final picture will look like. Everyone is simply focused on the connections between the pieces in their little corner of the puzzle. Trying to replicate this automatic process with one that’s explicitly designed and fully understood by the designers is extremely hard.
It’s like trying to replace entire forest ecosystems with one where all the plants are carefully planted by hand (like some giant garden). I think we’re smart enough to know we can’t do that without risking a catastrophic collapse.
The screw-maker lives in China or Vietnam. They don’t speak English or even know which languages are spoken by their customers, yet they make screws used for building houses all over the world.
But why tho? We dont need to exploit cheap labor in anarchism, so this sounds like an undesirable setup.
One of the goals of anarchism might be turning back globalism for unnecessary things while keeping those things that are benifitial for humans and as well as rest of the earth.
That’s the miracle of markets.
I say we can live without that.
Screw production is actually automated nowadays.
Infinite loop detected
Only if you're stuck in a mindset of "it's valuable even if literally nobody wants it enough to make it"
Cleaning sewers? Generally anything waste related?
There are some people that actually kinda love those jobs, but idk if there are enough of them. And a game of chicken where the first person to become too annoyed at the smell in the streets fixes the issue would be... not great.
But anyway that'd only ever be an issue if there's no market at all but that's not a necessity to not have capitalism
Pretty sure once the waste starts to pile up it'd be valuable enough to society to remove it that lots of people would be willing to do it. There's people out there right now working full time jobs and still picking up garbage on the side of the road in their free time because they don't want to look at it.
Yeah but you don't want to leave waste up to "we'll do it when the problem gets bad enough."
It requires maintenance and prevention, and while there might be people who recognize that and want to do the prevention there are almost certainly not enough for how large of a task it is. Especially because some of that prevention involves wading around in the poopy water, no body wants that without incentive.
It's the same thing for things like road maintenance and electrical and plumbing maintenance. There are people who would do some of the jobs for free, again maybe, I'm just letting that go for the sake of argument. But those tasks are huge and require vast networks of people with a lot of education doing them professionally. Most are only there right now because they get a paycheck.
This can be a critical mass thing, though. Some projects are pointless unless you get enough people involved, but then have worthwhile results.
I would also put 'safety' in the "valuable, but no one wants to use it" category (note - not create safety systems, but convincing the truck driver or forge worker or backyard chemist to implement and use them).
Then you need to get enough people willing to work on it. If you cannot, then its value is non-existent because it cannot exist without coercion.
When it comes to safety, as long as they are informed and not harming anyone else to do so then it is their choice to take as much risk as they are comfortable with taking. People tend to value their own safety but each values it differently than others, and it is their right to do so as long as they are not imposing harm on anyone else through their actions.
Coercion can be a relative thing - anything from slavery to a gentleman's agreement that if you help me build a house, I'll help you build a house, because neither of us wants to lift rafters on our own.
The work required to e.g. build a (reasonably large) bridge is substantial; the work required to maintain that bridge in a safe condition is also substantial and it's quite well known in free software circles that maintenance is a lot less sexy than building another shiny new bridge - government can struggle with this too, but that's where rigid safety and oversight systems come into it. Start looking at dams and it gets way more scary.
Many many safety failures affect far more than the person who made the decision. That said, you often find the opposite - many people value others' safety more than their own.
Solarpunk folks be like "would you be willing to CAD a tensegrity-constructed X and print it on your solar-powered 3d printer out of compostable polymer sustainably synthesized from hemp?"
The answer, obviously, is "hell yeah".
How would we produce the processors necessary for the 3d printer tho?
Stack overflow
wouldnt get made because it isnt useful.
NEXT!
I get it and am here for the anarchy of it all, but there's no "no" coming out of the "Would other people be willing..." box, which a capitalist would say is the most important line.
Maybe it should loop back to the "Then capitalism is wasting..." box, since if nobody is willing to create it, is it really valuable enough to exceed creation inertia?
There is a “no”. It loops back to the top.
Haha, oh my god, I looked everywhere and didn't see it. Leaving my comment as-is as a lasting monument to my cluelessness.
Which is funny because it shows the same logic that you stated by returning to the "Is it valuable" question. So even if you missed it, you still came to the same conclusion which just goes to reinforce the legitimacy of the flowchart.
I can hear it now: "Eventually, but the competition of capitalism accelerates innovation so we can have it now instead of decades or centuries from now."
Maybe life would be actually enjoyable without the constant forced pressure of having to be "valuable."
The "innovation" is why the climate and biosphere are going to shit. It's accelerationism -- straight into a cliff wall that's on the other side of an abyss.
There are jobs that generally no one wants to do but everyone needs done. You can't rely on pure volunteerism to keep garbage collection running.
People say this but clean their own toilets and take out their own trash literally every day. We could go on an talk about capitalist overproduction and production for profit over production for need creates too much garbage, but I doubt its necessary.
You are correct. I would like to add that in rural areas, one also has to act as their own garbage collection service and drive their garbage to the dump, which should be 50 miles or more away.
I've had some strange responses to this when I suggested that under communism not every job would pay the same. Apparently loads of people would love to do soul destroying jobs like ER or IC nursing for the same amount of money I get paid to write shitty code
Also a lot of these "soul destroying jobs" would stop being one when there's enough people working on those
What if not enough people want to do them? Your going to need to find some way to attract enough people to those roles
Even if everyone is "paid" the same, you still can control how much hours 1 person should do their roles.
Indeed. In effect paying someone a higher wage for their time.
I would probably still be a nurse after a revolution lol
X is the opposite of valuable.
This is perfect! I find it kind of hard to explain this concept to friends.
This is the one
What about Y? Or A-W for that matter? And Z???