I understand fully that compulsory and guaranteed employment is both necessary and awesome in a socialist society in transition towards communism. But once communism has been fully achieved, would this compulsory employment still be a thing, especially since there is no currency that motivates many to work?
Without a state possessing coercive capabilities I don’t really see how it could force people to work, especially without money and such.
However this issues should be able to be dealt with thanks to automation and the promotion of social duty.
There have been a few cases of socialist countries where working wasn’t compulsory and you would get paid wether you showed up or not. While those case were probably too early in development to be economically viable, we can still use them to demonstrate that many people still choose to work without being forced to, when being in a mostly non-exploitative environment.
In capitalism, the ruling class forces/coerces everyone else to work. People need to be coerced in some way because it is obviously against one’s interests to produce what one needs to live and then to produce a surplus for a violent, selfish, greedy stranger.
By the time we get to a moneyless society, everyone will be in the ruling class (really, there will be only one class, so the idea of class will be dissolved, but that’s a bit pedantic for my point). In that scenario, it seems to me that people will not need to be forced to work, as that would be like forcing oneself to work.
In this sense, work will be ‘compulsory’ but not in the same way as it is today (or might have been e.g. during some parts of the USSR’s history). It’ll be more like the idea of cooking dinner is compulsory – you have to do it if you want to turn your raw ingredients into something edible and tasty. Or compulsory in the sense that even if someone else does the cooking, you need to find a way of getting the food off the plate and into one’s mouth. Compulsory in the sense of logically necessary rather than forced.
Employment is a relation between employer and employer. I can’t see communists keeping that distinction. But work/labour will be guaranteed. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need’. (I also agree with @Nimux@lemmygrad.ml, that automation and social duty will have a much bigger role than they do today.
Humans worked for almost the entirety of their ~200,000 year history without needing money to motivate them. Humans work because it’s in our nature to be creative, improve our condition, and reduce the need for work in the future (e.g. you don’t have to farm, but if you don’t, you’ll be wandering around the woods everyday and sometimes/often will go hungry). Even in capitalism, money is not the primary motivation for working. It’s just a big motivation for doing shit jobs for terrible bosses, under horrid conditions, but it’s not the reason humans work.
I’d also suggest, perhaps controversially, that it’s not really money that motivates people in capitalism, as opposed to the threat of homelessness, starvation, etc. Money is just the surface level detail of the underlying relations. Money does come to be fetishised, but the people who fetishise money (or commodities) have simply misunderstood those underlying relations.
Basically, once all the world is socialist my understanding is that labor will be increasingly automated, decreasing the work day, and eventually work will be fully optional. Didn’t Marx say something about work becoming life’s prime want? People will still do work as in making art or playing sports, but they will not be compelled to. And some people will probably always want to do regular jobs like nursing for example, and they will be allowed to. There will probably still be necessary labor, but as it is not coerced people will want to do it. For example: people like to code in their free time, and we will probably still need people that can manage the central planning organ, there will be people working that, not because they have to, but because they want to. People will have complete freedom of education and career (like capitalism falsely claims it has).
Even if everything is as automated as possible, someone needs to fix the broken machines. Teenagers will also probably break machines during their rebelious phase and make things interesting. Also, many people like feeling productive to society. If the job is not a total slog and the information about how to do it over the internet is available, I suppose stochastically most issues would be fixed by some volunteer. If it is a painfully dull and difficult thing to fix the society can reward the work with access to luxury goods or internet clout, or the state making the person a celebrated hero. There are all kinds of ways to motivate people.
