Here is my response to this post as a socialist (as promised earlier), which I am putting as a reblog of this reblog because it raises an original point while most of the rest are in some form restating the original post or the first addition in this chain (i.e., things along the lines of "commies are lazy and don't want to do anything themselves"). I think what is happening on many of those reblogs and the original post itself is that people are in some sense conflating two separate objections - one towards the practical organization of society implied (how would anything get done in practice?), and one towards the personal moral character of socialists (laziness, "they want to be the people not doing anything while someone else has to do all the work," etc.). While there is a connection, I will somewhat detangle them and address them separately, as well as put forward my thoughts on this reblog by shadowfromthestarlight, which I think presents the most accurate understanding of the mindset of the type of socialist described here. Note that I do not seek to address every possible critique of socialism in this comment, I want to just address the relevant points/issues mentioned here. Preamble over.
First, the addition I am reblogging from. You are correct that many do think like this (though I think it's more common with anarchist-leaning types). And indeed, a society where nobody has to do dangerous or undesirable work and everyone is free to spend all their time pursuing what interests them would be wonderful, a goal for humanity to strive towards. However, anyone who knows anything about the current state of robotics can tell that this is very far from being feasible anytime soon. Automation increases the productivity of labor but does not eliminate the need for it altogether.
This brings us to the point of: so how exactly would a socialist society get enough people to do undesirable sorts of work? There are a few points worth mentioning about that, which I'll just list in no particular order:
If under capitalism you are working in a job that will continue to exist under socialism, for example, as a factory worker producing pharmaceuticals or a scientist developing them, it is likely that after a socialist revolution you will continue working in the same job, with the changes being in the administrative matters around that. That is, for most occupations, the labor pool remains the same.
Most socialists would support guaranteed and obligatory employment for all adult able-bodied citizens.
Of course, we want to maximize the freedom people have in choosing their job (after all, it is what they spend a considerable amount of waking hours doing). The incentives against choosing some job in the form of significant risk of physical harm to one's person (say, uranium miners) should be compensated for with benefits such as early retirement, increased vacation days, and material incentives, e.g. higher salary (in fact, I'd argue that such jobs should be the ones with the highest pay).
It would be reasonable to have a system like obligatory military service where every citizen has to complete a set amount of time doing various undesirable types of labor (or really any other that is necessary too, eg farmwork). This reduces the number of people who have to do that full-time and means that everyone has to partake responsibility in the functioning of society, as well as inspire respect for people who do such work. I think it's fully reasonable that in exchange for society being guaranteed to provide for you and the means of production belonging to everyone collectively, it is expected to take responsibility and fulfill one's duties by performing the labor required. I think any serious socialist recognizes this.
Now, finally, to address the charges regarding the personal character of socialists. I think it's basically answered by the previous series of points. I'm not particularly interested in defending my own personal moral character here as it's a pretty silly thing to do and there isn't much to say besides "well, I would do those things" (because one has a duty to... I do things to help others for free already. It's not an issue, one must simply feel a sense of responsibility for one's fellow man) and the only way it would be relevant in any way would be as an attempt to provide a counterexample to the charge of "all socialists are xyz." I'm not interested in socialism to get stuff for free myself, I am interested in it to provide a dignified life to others. To think people could only possibly want the former demonstrates a failure of theory of mind.
It is essentially irrelevant what the personal qualities of any individuals are, we are interested in implementing a given economic system with given incentives rather than litigating our virtue. I think the relevant bit of this point that people have repeated in various forms in the reblogs is that all or the majority of socialists are under the illusion that they won't have to do labor, for whatever reason. All I can say is that this is false based on my extensive experience interacting with socialists/communists who are not literally children, and that we tend to think that if someone does have such a mindset it's good to correct it. It's incompatible with being a principled socialist. This is probably an unsatisfactory response, but I just don't think this is a well-defined or relevant objection.
