That’s unfortunate to hear. I have a couple friends in the medical field (nurse, PA) and a few who are teachers, and they do these things because they find them fulfilling and meaningful despite the pay not being extravagant and the work being hard. I assumed that was not uncommon.

reached through a revolution that requires forceful action.

Another place where my wording I guess gave the wrong impression. That wasn’t meant specifically to address war (although I did expect to hear a more militant bent, which I’m heartened is not the case), but people who want radical change quickly. It’s not that I don’t understand wanting that, or being willing to sacrifice to get there, but I’ve seen enough people over the years just nonchalantly forget that people who aren’t young, healthy firebrands are still going to need a place in the future they want to build. And not keeping them in mind specifically while you work toward that future means a lot of them won’t make it there with you.

I’m less worried about that now than I was when I first asked this question. I needed a counterexample of people doing exactly the work of not forgetting the people most dependent on a system (not necessarily the current one, but they will need systemic supports to survive in any arrangement) and I got it.

Also, sorry, one last little thing I have to get on a soapbox about because people need to know it

or animal organs and a purification process

This should not be considered an option in a world where modern biologics can exist. This is a red herring just like walmart R and N to trick people who aren’t personally affected into believing there’s an option available when the “fancy” stuff isn’t on the table. Modern insulin analogs should be considered the only humane treatment until we get something better. There’s literally no reason to settle for worse.

You are kind of contradicting yourself. Either it is super specialized work that can’t be done part time by people that need it to be done for their other work (researchers, medical professioals etc.), or it is repetitive factory work a partimer like you could do.

I don’t really see it as a contradiction because it’s both. At different parts in the process that gets it from the vat into a person, and sometimes they both overlap at some stages of the process.

Your latter point is actually very well taken, though. I guess my perspective on a lot of that kind of labor is overly colored by doing it 8 hours at a time. That’s the kind of obvious-but-not-obvious thing I was looking for.

Despite my specific concern not being addressed by anything they’re demonstrating (yet), this is the answer I actually appreciate the most because you woke up who I used to be a little bit, and because I can accept that as hard proof that there’s an element who feels incentivized to not leave me behind.

So that’s it, I guess, confusion and concern resolved.

Sorry it took me a while to respond, I watched the whole video. Thank you.

I don’t think I’m confusing that? I’m not arguing “keep capitalism,” I’m trying to build a mental model of what incentives drive people toward doing that in between zone of grueling work that doesn’t tend to light a fire under people, but isn’t so easy to diffuse the workload of.

Maybe it’s not as special a case as I think it is. I don’t know.

Also, can you explain why you linked the Psychology Today article? I’m stupid, I don’t really see the connection.

This is a slave mentality. Menial and grueling work persist whether capitalism persist or dies: chores, building, sewage, waste disposal, material gathering, your examples, etc… It just won’t be coerced by force of a rich exploiter (bourgeoisie). Right now the materials you exemplified are extracted via slavery. Anarchists just want the extractors to be fully recompensed for their work, not stolen to.

Yes, exactly. All of those examples you listed are things that I can see pathways for in a world without any hard or soft coercion pressuring people to do them. Solutions to getting that work accomplished are numerous, including having more people do less of that work (lightening the burden on everyone and minimizing the amount of time anyone needs to spend on it), and simply opening the position up to people who want to do it (you mention building, but I actually know a few people who I think legitimately would choose construction in a world absent any external forces demanding they do it). And I feel like the actual production and distribution of advanced medication sits in a weird middle ground where it’s often too specialized to farm out, but not quite as passion inducing as building or even material gathering can be. Like, am I just completely off on the notion that humans aren’t built for repetitive, tedious tasks like that and people wouldn’t choose it if there were other options?

EDIT: Sorry, forgot one more thing I wanted to say

How do you know this?

Learning skills that help heal sick people is one of the most brazen examples of prosociality I can think of, and I have no doubt that the more obvious, more visible helping professions would thrive in a world where capitalism and strict heirarchy were non-factors. It’s the stuff so far down the chain that most people never think about it that confuses me.

I have no doubt that professional associations could work the way some open source projects do, with equal contributors who merely have different roles. I also have no doubt that such institutions would arise and be well staffed with people who really care about doing that work. And there are plenty of consortiums that are capable of designing standards independent of states, so an easy model exists for working groups like that.

Are there less exploitative ways to manufacture drugs and distribute them to all, where there is no need to distribute profit to shareholders or goose the share price, because the company is now a bunch of cooperatives?

This is the part of your response that hits the closest to what concerns me, I think. The answer is “I don’t know.” And that’s because I see work like assembly line or factory work as about as far from humanizing as possible. I don’t think anyone would do it without some external motivation. The day to day work of producing stuff I use isn’t the kind of thing there’s typically a lot of passion for. The design? Sure. Engineering? Absolutely. But like…extruding the thousands of miles of tubing, or inspecting box after box of insulin, it’s not…really that. And I did some temp work in a factory a long time ago, so I speak from some experience there. It’s something you do to make money, not because you deeply care about it. Everyone I worked with would rather have been doing anything else, and I can’t blame them.

So if you asked my uneducated ass what a more equitable version of that would look like, I’d say that person inspecting boxes should get all of the fruits of their work, and they should be compensated well for that work to acknowledge how much it sucks and how much that bit of themselves is valued. Without an external motivator, why would anyone put themselves in that environment? And that’s not a rhetorical question (well, ok, I guess it sort of is also that), but an earnest one. Doubly so if the environment is toxic but still ultimately necessary (some medical things just absolutely have to be single use plastics – something that has eaten at me for a long time as I see the pile of extra refuse created by just a year of keeping me ticking). The fear is that since nobody has to do it, the only people who care enough to do it will be people directly affected by it, and at population densities that low, we’re too rarified to just do it ourselves. In my entire life I’ve met…two others out in the wild (as in not in the waiting room at the endo’s office).

Maybe I’m baring a little much for a question like this, but when I try to reason through how things would function the thing it seems to point back to is “you’re supposed to have died a long time ago, your survival is a weird fluke of a particular set of incentives” and I guess I’m struggling to see through a lens other than that, which is why I came asking for help looking at it differently.

Am I just crazy? Is this a set of concerns so out there that it’s not even wrong? I just can’t build a mental picture of what this looks like without having to invoke scifi tech to fill in gaps.

Sorry, I’m going to do the annoying blockquote thing just because your split this up so nicely into chunks for me to digest and respond to.

These type of questions are always based in the unrealistic assumption that an anarchist society would have to start from scratch and have none of the existing knowledge and production facilities.

I’m actually not trying to make that assumption here, although I should have been clearer. My response to annother commenter goes more into depth on what I’m talking about (or at least tries to, my thoughts are being updated in real time).

pharmaceuticals are actually not all that complicated to produce with modern biotechnological means.

I mean, for certain drugs and certain definitions of “that complicated,” I guess kinda? But producing it at scale, in sterile conditions, at extremely specific titrations, and moving it with a cold chain to where it’s needed…that’s fairly specific work that isn’t particularly glamorous or sometimes even healthy. Certainly, things could be done to make those things easier (bring back trains), but like…at the end of the day, you’re still farming and processing genetically modified bacteria with precision. It might not be rocket science, but it’s not easy. The only project I’m aware of working on making insulin something easily produced in a distributed way has been over a decade without more than a few micrograms made. And that’s without the burden of patent encumberance (they tried with just human insulin, not the newer stuff we use for better quality of life), that’s just “getting this to work at pharmacy scale.”

And last but not least, very few modern Anarchists advocate for a single hugely destructive “revolution”, knowing full well the risks that come with that and how historically such revolutions have always just replaced the oppressors but not altered the system of oppression significantly. The idea is rather a more gradual replacement of power structures bottom up starting with municipalities and so on.

That’s good to know. Building parallel tools for getting things done avoids another fear I have, which is instability. Being dependent on a system (not necessarily this system, but a lot of moving pieces have to work to keep me alive) just means death if there’s too long of a break.

So the question for you should be rather how you can prepare for this likely eventuality and not some imagined hypothetical scenario where Anarchists cause a world revolution.

I’m going to be honest, this feels like trying to turn it around on me, and I don’t super appreciate that, but I’m going to read it charitably anyway because text is bad at conveying those things and I’m probably wrong.

Anyway, I do have a plan. I’ve had to think about it a lot this past year especially, but even before then, this isn’t something I suspect any diabetic has avoided thinking about. If either of those scenarios happen in the near to medium future, the answer is the same. Hold out as long as I can doing what I can to create a survivable environment for the people I’m surrounded by, and then as soon as I’m out of ways to get insulin, eat a bullet. Having dipped my toe into the shallow end of dying from that twice before, it’s not worth it to continue that for several days before going out.

Sorry, I promise, I’m not trying to be combative, it’s just that I’m sure there’s about to be a big change, good or bad, and I’m gonna be real, right now I need a picture of a future better than this that still has me in it. And the more I refine my picture of what that world might look like, the more I realize that my existence is predicated on a lot of incentives that currently lean in the direction of keeping me alive. With new rules (or no rules), you have to wonder if the calculus still works out on the keeping you alive side. Especially when the process of doing that is so energy intensive, polluting and moralized.

I suppose I should clarify, I’m not really talking about the doctor end. People want to be doctors. Even in a future where being a doctor is not “lucrative” in the current sense, the life satisfaction, social prestige and genuine desire to help people work in tandem to ensure that absent capitalist abuses, the world would not want for doctors. In fact, I suspect that doctor to patient medical care would improve considerably for most people. I’m really thinking about the unsexy parts of medicine. Someone has to work in a factory to get the insulin made after it’s researched and designed and before doctors prescribe it. Someone has to be in a plant that produces teflon tubing. I fully don’t believe that factory work (and especially factory work that can expose you to toxic chemicals like plasticizers) is something anyone actually wants to do. It’s not classic dream job material. And unfortunately, the production of some medications is too complex to have people just do a weekend in rotation to share the load like you might with say garbage collection. And to put it plainly, my worry isn’t “nobody will want to work anymore,” it’s “what stops people like me from being forgotten when the incentive structure to do the dirty work of keeping us alive is gone?” The answer might be great, but I just don’t know what it is.

To be clear, this isn’t me saying “the current system is great!” it’s me asking “yes, but in a practical boots on the ground way, how would this part work?”