‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, wrote Karl Marx in his 1875 book ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’. The tenet that work is an obligation to society and gives meaning to human existence is central to socialism and is the traditional answer to the critique that equality of outcome removes incentives to work. Work is supposed to be fulfilling and meaningful, a central part of a workers identity. But in reality it is obvious that some work isn’t. This presents socialists with a problem. Some work is dirty: toilets need cleaning, sewers need unblocking, rubbish needs collecting. Some work is dangerous: high rises needs windows cleaned, trees need logging, mines need mining. Some work is just boring. How do you recruit workers for the most dirty, dangerous or tedious jobs if everyone is paid the same?
There is one obvious solution. In Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, the imaginary socialist-like society used slaves – prisoners of war or criminals – for the work no one was willing to do. Communist Russia adopted this approach: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his masterpiece ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, writes: ‘The labour of the zeks (prisoners in the Gulag labour camps) was needed for degrading and particularly heavy work, which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform.’ Of course, the need for labour contributed to the draconian horror of mass incarceration on trumped up charges which only the most fanatical Stalinist apologists attempt to defend. Today, North Korea continues the communist tradition of slave labour camps.
But socialist ideologues do attempt to come up with more palatable solutions. The 18th century philosopher Charles Fourier, an early socialist thinker, argued that those children who enjoyed being dirty should do the dirty work, but later socialists realize that this is not a viable position. Some try to argue that the real dirty work is that of soldiers, bankers or bailiffs, and that such jobs will not exist in a socialist utopia. Others claim that there will always be some who will take pride in even the most degrading job, like the proud toilet cleaners ‘boasting of the spotless condition of “their” toilets’.
Of course, most of those who today call themselves socialists may realize that some wage differentiation is necessary to create a functioning economy and incentivise people to take on various jobs. What they fail to appreciate is that the mechanism for determining the degree of pay differentiation is wage formation in a free market. The obvious folly of Marx and other devout socialists reveal the naïve assumptions that lay behind all socialist thinking. It diminishes the role that incentives play in human interaction, assuming that voluntary exchange in a free market can be replaced by some non-compulsory state-instituted mechanism that allocates goods, services, duties and rewards in a ‘fair’ manner (fairness obviously being the subjective notion of a just distribution of whoever is in power). The reality is that every society needs dirty, dangerous and unpleasant tasks performed and in a capitalist economy those types of jobs gets remunerated better than other similarly skilled occupations. This is how people are incentivised to do them. Socialism can claim that everybody should contribute only according to their ability, but to achieve their goal they would have to alter human nature or start sending people off to the labour camps.