I think, if we are to consider ourselves Marxists, we should first take a look at not only the material history of sanitation workers, but look at how current societies handle the task of public hygiene.
Some related information about the USSR:
Public hygiene, in my opinion, includes things like Public Health. From the first link, we can get a sense of how the USSR tackled the task of ensuring the health of its citizens. It was clear as well that there were people involved in the task of keeping the streets clean, and they were using mechanized solutions for that task.
Japan is a notoriously clean country. When I visited several years ago, it was impossible to imagine how they kept it so clean, but it's not magic.
There are no public trashcans in Tokyo and mostly throughout Japan as well. This is a result of the Tokyo bombings in the mid-90s, which resulted in a ban on public trash bins. This obviously forces you to have to carry your trash with you to the next available trash bin, which you likely will find at your destination, be it work or a store.
But more interestingly, Japan attempts to instill in its young people a sense of cleanliness. Maybe this isn't a universal truth among all schools in Japan, but the essence of this thinking is sound. Having students clean their school, as part of the day-to-day ritual of learning, seems to instill in them a cleanliness mindset.
But let's look elsewhere [treehugger.com]
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The sidewalks in Norway's relaxed capital city are known for being quite clean. Visitors might be puzzled, then, by the complete absence of trash cans around parts of the city. Mystery solved: Many Oslo neighborhoods are connected to the city's automatic trash disposal system, which uses pumps and pipes to move trash underground to incinerators where it is burned and used to create energy and heat for the city. With a city center that is almost completely free of fossil fuel cars and has the highest number of electric cars per person in the world, Oslo residents embrace the clean city lifestyle. The city has replaced hundreds of parking spaces with bicycle lanes and pedestrian areas.
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Singapore's impeccably clean streets reflect some of the strictest littering laws and best public services in the world. Littering is a finable offense in Singapore. Steep taxes for owning a car and a useful public transportation system mean that the air is quite clean in this Southeast Asian city-state as well. Clean & Green Singapore is the city’s program to reduce trash and encourage residents to adopt a hygienic lifestyle. In an effort to become a zero-waste city, Singapore has created educational resources to teach residents how to recycle properly, use fewer disposables, and waste less food.
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Already quite clean by world standards, Denmark’s capital city has taken steps to decrease littering and create trash and recycling schemes that make it easier to sort individual items. Copenhagen residents recycle electronic, garden, and bio waste in addition to the standard paper, plastic, metal, glass, and cardboard items. Copenhagen also stands out because of its air quality. It has reduced emissions by 42 percent since 2005 and is on track to be carbon-neutral by 2025. The city also has a number of impressive green traits, including a long-term plan to make itself the world's most bike-friendly city.
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Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, frequently ranks among the world’s most livable cities for its cleanliness and quality of life. The city’s layout includes a tremendous amount of parkland and wide avenues lined with greenery. British surveyor and colonist William Light designed Adelaide in 1837 with the goal of creating a city that was compact and user-friendly, but also had an abundance of green spaces. City residents participate in the annual Clean-Up Australia Day event by removing debris from the 1,700 acres of parkland that surround the central business district.
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A clean and sustainable city is part of the culture in New Mexico’s capital, where the annual Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival is dedicated to art made with at least 75 percent recycled materials. Keep Santa Fe Beautiful, a volunteer program, aims to prevent litter and boost awareness through educational programs. The city also holds volunteer trash pickup days, and many of the buildings in the main tourist areas, including the famous Santa Fe Plaza, are kept pristine as part of the aggressive historic preservation efforts that have helped this city retain its timeless appearance. The state of New Mexico, including the city of Santa Fe, has some of the nation’s strictest emissions laws.
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While some cities' organizations sponsor once-yearly cleanup days, the Waikiki Improvement Association holds quarterly cleanups of its famous beach. Honolulu has also enacted strict litter laws. Severe penalties are imposed on those who violate these laws, including picking up litter as part of community service requirements.
So what do we see here?
- State run events that encourage citizens to clean up their city.
- Technological solutions to centralize and automate trash collection from pedestrians.
- Cultural solutions that instill a cleanliness mindset in students that carries with them as adults.
But what causes a city or town to be uncleanly? Well, San Francisco has a poop problem, and wouldn't you know it, it also has a huge houseless problem. One of the ways that you tackle this Public Sanitation issue, is to ensure the source of the problems are solved, too. Remember, Marxism is a system of dialectics, which basically states that all things impact and shape all other things. Or more simply, nothing happens in a vacuum. If you're thinking, "Well, who is going to clean up the poop?" You're not thinking like a Marxist. You have to ask "Why is there so much poop?" which brings you to the houseless problem, which should then have you asking "So how do we solve this houseless problem?"
Tackling houselessness and taking a housing first approach, or doing something extreme like the USSR's communal flats, would obviously go a long way to easing the issue of public sanitation. Obviously, tackling the houseless issue will be shaped by the material conditions of the area in question. If there was some kind of, socialist revolution in America tomorrow, I see no reason why these massive, mostly vacant, office complexes in nearly every city couldn't be converted into housing-first epicenters.
Houselessness is only one of the things that can cause a Public Sanitation issue, there could be countless reasons why a given town or city has a Sanitation issue. You have to investigate these issues, and understand the conditions that create them, and change those conditions.
Another question we need to be probing too, however, is where do we even get this concept of "Janitorial" work? Is this just a social construction developed over time that we need to try and understand dialectically? I think it might be.
Let's see what this has to say: The History of Domestic Workers and Janitors.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a lot of people lived on farms, where everyone in the household did the work. The Industrial Revolution drove people to move to big cities and get jobs outside the home. In these gendered times, the man was the breadwinner and the wife cared for the home and children. Kids weren’t little workers like they were on the farm.
Consider the theory of primitive accumulation in this context as well. As Feudalism succumbed to Capitalism, and land became privatized, peasants no longer had access to the land for their own subsistence, a work typically done by the women, as the men were converted in to wage laborers, and the family now required wages for food
But there was too much work for the women at home to do on their own. Between childcare, cleaning and cooking, it was too much. All of these newly domesticated wives wanted help.
But bringing another adult into your home to help is complicated. They’re in your personal space–even your sexual space. They’re in your bedroom. The thinking was, we don’t want to bring in someone who’s our equal, someone from our own community. We’ll bring in someone who, by status, is below us. It could be an enslaved woman. On the East Coast, it was often a poor Irish immigrant working on a labor contract. On the West Coast, it was often an indigenous child, kidnapped from their own family and forced into domestic bondage.
Here we can see, at least in the American context, how the requirement for free labor, not only of the women in the reproduction of the worker, also required it for the women, due in part to their alienation and isolation from the commons, the need for more unpaid labor in the form of servants or slaves
The reasoning was, When this servant is in our home, they don’t really count because they’re our social inferior. That’s why from the start, domestic work depended on social hierarchy, and the invisibility of the help.
This requirement of invisibility ultimately engenders disdain for this kind of domestic work. That disdain is developed and transformed over time into a classist point of view of domestic labor and janitorial labor.
This article goes on, and outlines how "the help" eventually was transformed into domestic cleaning and janitorial work we know today. You can see the social remnants of this development in the classist view of janitorial work that many people have. It also outlines how, through policy in the United States, domestic workers were kept behind the typical gains of the average worker.
For context, the Roosevelt Administration passed the New Deal in the 1930s. This reform gave workers the right to form unions and work shorter days. But the New Deal exempted domestic and agricultural workers. So those laws made a ton of jobs for white people work better. But because domestic work didn’t get fixed, it was the most marginalized people who were forced to stay domestic workers.
Here’s another example: In 1950s Detroit, the minimum wage and 40-hour workweek were already in effect. But many black workers didn’t get these rights, unless they were in an autoplant with a union. Many black people in Detroit had jobs that were invisible: housecleaner, car wash attendant, laundress, dishwasher in a restaurant. Yes, you earned minimum wage, but you worked 70 hours a week.
This eventually leads us to where we are today:
Being a domestic worker in 2021 is much better than being one in 1870. People have more leverage now. What’s unfortunately stayed the same is that domestic and janitorial work is still largely invisible and low wage. And it’s still a profession that’s performed largely by poor women, people of color, and immigrants. In recent times, we haven’t seen another round of much-needed reforms.
So this is where the heart of the question comes from. Your friend is effectively asking: "Who will be the invisible help who cleans up after me in a Socialist arrangement of the economy" and also saying, "No one wants to be a Janitor because, look at how we treat them. God help me if that becomes me."
This is why the question of "Who does the dishes after the revolution?" is such a farce. It assumes that we will still have the class structures we have today, and that we would still have these backwards views on this type of work. It also exposes the individual, showing you what they really believe, which is that there should be an underclass who keeps everything clean for the upper class.
What we've seen in our current context above is that we can solve many of these Public Sanitation issues in many ways that don't involve an underclass.
- Japan has students keep their school and classroom clean, and instills in their students a cleanliness mindset.
- We can take Japan's model for students and apply it to the workplace. Workers spending a portion of their day ensuring the workspace is clean. We know this is already done in places like Grocery Stores, but it should be extended to all workspaces.
- Norway uses a complex system to collect and incinerate trash placed into public bins, generating heat to be reused by citizens and automating the process of trash collection and disposal.
- The USSR created a public sanitation organ of the state for tackling infectious diseases.
- Solving the houseless crisis will lead to fewer people living without shelter, and consequently not leaving their trash in public or having to defecate outside.
- Cities and States can organize citizen lead cleaning efforts regularly to not only clean the space we all live in, but also build community around keeping our space clean.
What we've seen in our historical context below is that our views on domestic and janitorial work are rooted in patriarchal and racist world views, world views that developed from the transformation of the peasant to the wage laborer, the subjugation of women under the demands of capitalism, and capitalism's exploitation of free labor, in the form of slaves and the domestic work of women. There is a dialectical connection between our views on Janitorial Labor and Domestic Labor, Patriarchy, and White Supremacy.
So to answer the question of "Who will do the dishes after the revolution?" The answer should be "All of us."
