Edit: Changed title to be more accurate.
Also here is the summary from Wikipedia on what Post-scarcity means:
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
Capitalism keeps people from the jobs they want. Literally. If the job you want can’t meet your basic needs. Capitalism falsely posits that it’s because the job has no value. Rather than the value of it not being generally understood or valued by others.
Capitalism is still good at making menial valueless work to under pay you for however.
I’m not saying it gets you the job you want, I’m saying no one can make you do a job you don’t want to do. People can incentivize you, with money. And I think collective organizing and bargaining is important to make things fair. I hear German firms have a union representative on the board, that seems pretty smart.
And it needs to be regulated. The government needs to force firms to pay to mitigate harmful externalities as well as incentivize positive externalities. And there should be social programs to take some of the edge off market fluctuations, like free or cheap training, help finding employment, cushioning some of the effects of market fluctuations for the average person.
I’m struggling to see what alternative you are envisioning here, but maybe I’m misunderstanding you. People and companies pay for the work they need done. When not enough people do that work, the salaries paid for it will increase. When there’s a large pool of people willing to do a job but not enough people and companies who need that job done, the salaries drop. The capitalist job market, from a theoretical perspective, seems to regulate the job market such that people choose jobs that are desired by society.
Now there’s obviously some downsides to this, because the gap between income levels is way too large in my opinion. Regulation is required so the CEO’s don’t earn like 200 times as much as the cleaning people. But in the end any system that exists needs to make sure that people do work that benefits society. And certain jobs are just more desired by society than others. Not everyone who likes drawing can become an artist, because in the end society just doesn’t need many artists. So any system should penalize people who try to do a job that society simply doesn’t need at that moment and incentivize jobs that have shortages.
The alternative is simple. But again obscured by saturation of capitalist propaganda. To start we, in the US especially, need to move towards social democracy. Single player health care, Austrian style public housing, etc.
If we provide people with a basic level of food and shelter. They will be free to work or not. And if you aren’t free enough to be able to choose not to work, you aren’t actually free. And here’s the kicker. Even though people wouldn’t have to work, they still would. Only now capitalist wouldn’t be able to use starvation and homelessness as a stick to beat people over the head with. In order to get them to accept traditionally bad capitalist deals.
Better still, entrepreneurs would be able to chase any business ideas they had. Artists would be able to persue their art. Musicians able to persue their music. If you wanted to spend your days gardening and landscaping a public plot. That capitalist deemed had no value. Just for your own enjoyment and the enjoyment of others. You can do that.
Pretty simple actually. Capitalists have pushed for the better part of a century to stop or demonize any progress towards communist evolution. And the other group, the revolutionaries have done nothing but give it a bad name.