This was written as a reply to the following article:
http://www.spanthatworld.com/comment-and-debate-communism-or-capitalism/I felt that the article needed addressing in several places, so this is my full response (also posted there but I thought you guys might like a look)
It's fun to denigrate the idea of production, but at the same time it tends to be true that the people who care least about the production of goods are those with significant personal resources. The supply chains for well crafted instruments are not insignificant, book production has to be done by somebody, and so on and so forth. To be wholly blunt, it's easy for people who are currently benefiting from our economic system to dismiss the idea of "producing stuff"; the vast numbers of people across the world who can't afford a decent roof over their heads, let along books, pens, or hiking boots, may be rather less enthusiastic. Wealth is unimportant - when you have some.
There's a reason Marx focussed on economics as his assessment of the problem with society, and that is that it does mean something. It means keeping people alive, it means whether they can get a good education, it means whether they can afford books or flutes or a home to go back to or clothes on their backs. Wealth is not just about buying goods, it Taking a look at many poorer parts of the world today we see the same issues he saw in 19th century Britain - unhappiness created most fundamentally by economic deprivation. Whilst his solution has proven unworkable, it is naive at best to deny validity to his assessment of the problem.
Nobody, of course, likes electing to do things that make them unhappy or that they do not enjoy. On the other hand, if nobody makes paper nobody can write on it, if nobody makes test tubes nobody can do chemistry, et cetera. If nobody does the nasty jobs in a society, rubbish gets buried in pits rather than recycled, things don't get manufactured at all, food doesn't get produced or get to where it needs to go. We need to give more remuneration to the jobs of these people most trapped in the current system, we need to work out better systems for doing some of these things, but most of all we need to learn to value the work these people do as a society. Denying its necessity is precisely the opposite of that.
As a second point, do we waste far too much in our consumption? Undeniably, and the choices people make when choosing what to consume are something we as a society need to get a grip on quickly (in 2007 British households wasted 4.1 million tonnes of food, but as a result of low quality food and poor nourishment we still obviously have obesity and malnourishment problems). Do the fact that production jobs make people unhappy and the fact that too much of that production is wasted mean consumption doesn't matter? No, it means it and how we deal with it matter all the more.
"Production", therefore, has its benefits - it's something that you interact with in thousands of ways for reading, for sleeping, for drinking, for getting to places, for working, for learning, for writing, for walking, for supporting the arts and sciences and academia, for eating, for living, and for most other ways of having fun (all bar thinking and sex, pretty much). Whilst there are issues in our society which don't relate to the problem of producing the right amount of stuff and what we produce and who can have it and how much they can have, actually those things are really, really, really important and are key to many of the issues and hardships in our society.
We can't just walk away from the fact that we're physical beings in a physical world and we use stuff and we need stuff, and so we need to work together to make sure that we get better systems of production, of consumption, and of distribution. Anything else - and especially denying that production is a key issue - is not only naive but an abdication of our responsibilities to look for a genuine, realistic, improved future for the society and world we live in.
