this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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I'll play
Garbage collection
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.
Before capitalism they used slaves and criminals, and before that they didn't take have sewage systems. You just went in the woods. Which worked when the population of the village was like 100 people - not so much when dealing with the shit of hundreds of thousands.
The indus valley civilization had a sewage system
They also had a mix of bartering and currency, so they also had capitalism of some sort. And that's going extremely far back. Money was invented as a concept essentially as soon as humans went from small villages to cities for a reason - the more complex and large the division of labor, the harder it is to get everyone to do what's needed.
But the issue with money is that power is attached to it inherently. The best system would be one that has currency of some kind that's regulated, but also doesn't carry power - maybe instead reduces it.
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.
I didn't say Capitalism is necessary. Tired of that strawman argument.
I'm saying Anarchism won't work, and this is but one example of why. A better system is needed.
A lot of people say capitalism is necessary and that was what it sounded like, considering the image in OP.
I don't know if the sewage example disproves anarchism and it depends what you mean by anarchism anyways. If a hierarchy suddenly pops up for some very specific purpose or instance, is it suddenly "not anarchism" or "anarchism doesn't work" if so many other things are done effectively in an "anarchist" way?
I'm not personally a strict 100% dogmatic anarchist, anyways. It's a tool and body of knowledge and set of principles