>For a person washing toilets, this could be the dream of sitting in front of that screen one day. For the person in front of that screen, it could be starting their own business or taking an early retirement and living the rest of their years off the beach.

And socialism could eliminate entirely the need to have someone washing toilets. I work in an office of about 2,000 people, over 10 floors, each with 2 sets of bathrooms for each gender. Going by 200 people per floor, assuming 50/50 gender split, that's 50 people per bathroom. It takes about half an hour to clean and restock each bathroom each day. Would you be hugely inconvenienced if you had to give up half an hour of your time every 50 days to clean the bathroom you use at work? I definitely wouldn't, and I think a lot of people would probably treat the bathrooms better if they did have to clean them on occasion.

Furthermore, the cleaners we have now aren't brain-dead animals: they have intellect, ideas, and ambitions of their own. I've met plenty of caretakers and other low-skilled workers who had been trained in other fields in the past, lost their jobs for varying reasons, and couldn't retrain due to time or financial constraints and got stuck in menial labour. Much of the time they simply cannot realistically ever move up the ladder. To quote Stephen Jay Gould:

>“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

We have created a lot of menial jobs for the sake of them: and in a lot of cases, they have been created because as this article mentions, a lot of well-educated workers no longer have the time to do non-work related tasks themselves. Would takeaway deliver drivers really be as common as they are now if people were working twenty hours a week, and had time to cook for themselves? What about Starbucks employees? Taxi drivers? There are millions of people who could actually use their full potential if they weren't constrained by wage slavery. Those people would also be much more efficient at what they do if they had the freedom to do what they enjoyed.

>Capitalism enables people to move up. The system you described would actually be perfectly reflective of a more social economic system like communism. The government would measure your competency and then offer you a series of jobs. You would take that a job off that list and you would do it til the day you were allowed to stop working. All without any chance for ever achieving something better beyond that list of jobs they decided you were qualified for. And of course you'd receive the same compensation when you're 18 as when you're 50 with decades of experience, because that's fair...

This is a huge misunderstanding of communism. There are many, many different forms of anti-capitalism, and very few actually believe a centralised government forcing people to work in pre-determined fields is a good idea. I'm not as clued up on communist/socialist theory as I should be, but afaik what you're describing is a form of state socialism, and one which almost all anti-capitalists vehemently disagree with. I've seen many arguments started by people suggesting state ownership of capital: almost everyone agrees that the risk of corruption is far too high with a centralised state.

I highly recommend reading The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin. It paints an excellent picture of a more reasonable anarcho-communist society, without a centralised state, which could realistically exist. Just to make this comment relevant to the original article: he originally suggested, in the late 19th century, that the industrial era had already increased production to the point that nobody should have to work more than four hours a day. Furthermore, that the time people saved could be spent building tools of automation to further reduce people's workload. It is, if anything, far more relevant today than it was when it was written.