That’s just an extension of the “who would clean the bathrooms?” “problem” (not really a serious issue just a lazy pro-capitalist-ideology rhetorical device)
Answer: The bathrooms need to be cleaned, so people would find a way to organize it being done.
Oh, just like garbage collection (and other things people don’t necessarily want/love to do) happened before/outside of capitalism.
Yeah, that is exactly what I’ve thought of Yanis V’s “critique” as well. Well said
It’s a kind of rebrand of Marxism that is missing out on some important points, even the defining elements of capitalism which are still in place. Like, he is saying capitalism is not capitalism anymore? His idea is that capitalism has been “killed” which is disingenuous at best (if he’s just using it as hyperbole) and completely wrong at worst, since we are indeed still broadly in the thick of it. It does seem sorta like he just wanted to sell a book or hear himself talk etc.
While it’s true there is no precedent for this amount of population and this complex of “sewage” requirements before or outside of capitalism, that doesn’t mean capitalism is necessary to manage a complex sewage system for a large population. When people use examples like this as a rationalization to say “capitalism is necessary” it is lazy and tunnel visioned. A million other considerations aside, the fact that capitalism is destroying the planet and making and keeping most peoples’ lives miserable, pointing to logistical challenges like “who will do this tough job” is not an excuse to maintain the coercion of capitalism’s sort of “slavery,” wage slavery. We will find a way to manage the “shit” especially since the infrastructure already exists, look, so much of it has been built and can just be managed in a different way. If we ever needed capitalism (debatable of course) we don’t anymore.