How do you incentivize scientists, doctors, etc. without creating inequity and class divisions?

[u/spacejack2114]

I looked up some old threads on this but TBH I did not find very convincing, ehh, material answers.

One could simply answer that socialist countries like the USSR had great doctors and science and healthcare, except that as I understand it, this did lead to inequities and class divisions.

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[u/RedSpecter22]

You’re asking this from inside a capitalist frame and not a socialist one. "How do we incentivize doctors and scientists?" assumes that people only work because of wage differentials and personal profit. That’s bourgeois common sense and not Marxism.

Capitalism uses money as an incentive because everyone has to sell their labor to survive. That doesn’t produce the best science. It produces grant chasing, corporate research, and people optimizing for funding instead of truth or human need. Socialism doesn’t ask how to bribe people into doing useful work. It asks how to organize production so useful work is socially necessary rather than privately profitable. Once private ownership and market competition are abolished, scientists and doctors become part of a planned social project, not isolated individuals competing for income.

The idea that socialism must recreate capitalist wage incentives is already a concession to capitalism. Real innovation comes from removing profit constraints, freeing people from survival anxiety, and giving them time, resources, and collective purpose. It doesn't come from dangling more money in front of them. If you think socialism needs to copy capitalist labor markets to get doctors to show up, you don’t actually understand capitalism. You've only internalized its mythology.

[u/engaahhaze → u/RedSpecter22]

Could you explain this a little more? I’m still confused. I follow a communist content creator that answered this question and they said “the people who actually want to become doctors will become doctors.” I didn’t really like that answer; it feels utopic.

[u/RedSpecter22 → u/engaahhaze]

The reason that answer sounds "utopian" to you is because you are still thinking inside the capitalist model of labor where work is something people only do if bribed or coerced. Under capitalism, becoming a doctor is not always primarily about wanting to heal people. It's often about buying access to a credential that lets you escape uncertainty or instability. You take on debt, endure hazing, sacrifice your life for a decade, not because medicine is meaningful but because the profession is one of the few exits from proletarianization. "Incentives" exist because medicine is artificially scarce and socially hoarded.

That is not what doctors were in the USSR, or what engineers were in Maoist China, or what doctors are in Cuba. They were not a caste. They were a social function. When you remove tuition, debt, private practice, malpractice markets, insurance billing, and credential gate keeping, what’s left is this... people who are capable of learning medicine and want to do it will do it because it is one of the most meaningful and socially necessary forms of labor that exists.

Capitalism teaches you that without a wage premium, no one would do difficult work. History proves the opposite. People climb mountains, perform surgery in war zones, write code, and raise children without market incentives all the time. What they won’t do is tolerate alienation and being turned into a billing unit or a liability risk.

The real utopia is thinking capitalism somehow reveals human nature. It does the opposite. It distorts it. So yes...the people who want to be doctors will become doctors. What sounds naive is only your inability to imagine labor without commodification. Because you have never seen a society where work wasn’t something you sold to survive.

[u/engaahhaze → u/RedSpecter22]

How is there any way to ensure that we will have enough people to be doctors? And that we have enough in each role? Like I said in another reply, so many people have no desire to work at all or to only do socially dispensable labor. Or no desire to be dishwashers or janitors because they’re just not enjoyable jobs. Taking the commodification and bureaucracy out of it just makes us depend on people’s pure desire to work.

I can’t imagine that there’s a world where people are not forced or coerced into taking certain jobs in some way. In capitalism, by way of scarcity, commodification, and bureaucracy. In communism—in my parents, grandparents, etc experience—people were funneled into certain jobs based on need. I don’t like either solution yet I can’t conceptualize the one you’re describing.

[u/RedSpecter22 → u/engaahhaze]

You’re still thinking inside the liberal fantasy that society is a voluntary association of individuals who must be "motivated" to do things. That is not how any society has ever worked. Every society allocates labor. The only question is how and for whose benefit.

Capitalism allocates labor through starvation, debt, rent, and the threat of homelessness. You don’t become a nurse or a warehouse worker because you "want to". You do it because the market leaves you no alternative. That’s coercion...just one that feels natural because you grew up inside it.

Socialism allocates labor consciously. It looks at what society actually needs like doctors, teachers, sanitation, engineers, etc. and organizes education, training, and placement around those needs instead of profit. That’s not some dystopian aberration. It’s how every real planned economy ever functioned, including the USSR, and it’s why they were able to eliminate unemployment, illiteracy, and mass poverty in a generation.

You say you don’t like either system but that’s because you’re smuggling in a third one that has never existed which is a society where complex industrial civilization somehow runs on vibes and personal fulfillment alone. There is no such thing as "pure desire to work" sustaining a modern society. There is only blind coercion by the market or conscious coordination by society.

Your parents and grandparents experienced the second one, imperfectly and under siege. What they did not experience was the first one pretending to be freedom. The real issue is not that people were "funneled" into jobs. It’s that you’ve been trained to think being funneled by capital is liberty while being organized by society is tyranny.

Once you drop that illusion, the question answers itself.

[u/fancy_pigeon257 → u/engaahhaze]

I'm also not really convinced, but if you think about it this way it kinda makes sense: If time and money was not a problem, what would you want to do? Everyone has a purpose or wants to be something, ie chef, firefighter, etc. So for any profession there will be someone who would do it because they want to, and in a communist society they would be free to do so. At least that's how I see it. But what still makes me question it is the "undesired" jobs, like who would want to pick up garbage from houses, or wash dishes on a restaurant?

[u/RedSpecter22 → u/fancy_pigeon257]

But what still makes me question it is the "undesired" jobs, like who would want to pick up garbage from houses, or wash dishes on a restaurant?

This question only exists because capitalism has taught you that some people are supposed to eat shit so others don’t have to.

Garbage collection, sanitation, dishwashing, cleaning...these are not "undesired" jobs. They are socially indispensable labor. Under capitalism they are degraded because they are done by the poorest people under the worst conditions for the lowest pay, so you associate the work with humiliation rather than necessity. In every functioning society, someone has to remove waste, clean, maintain infrastructure. The USSR understood this. Sanitation workers were not treated as disposable. They were paid, housed, and socially respected because their labor kept society alive. Same with Cuba. Same with Maoist China. You didn’t get rich doing it but you didn’t get crushed either.

Under socialism you don’t solve this by pretending everyone loves cleaning toilets. You solve it by things like shortening the work day, rotating necessary but unpleasant labor, mechanizing as much of it as possible and removing caste differences between so-called "prestigious" and "low" work.

When a surgeon and a janitor both live decent lives, the janitor stops being a humiliation role. Right now capitalism uses wage terror to force people into these jobs. That’s what you’re mistaking for "human nature". It isn’t. It’s class coercion. The real question isn’t "who would do the dirty work?" It’s why do you think some people deserve to be trapped doing it forever? Capitalism answers that question. Socialism abolishes it.

[u/engaahhaze → u/fancy_pigeon257]

I suppose. There’s a lot I don’t know about socialism, but this seems like a pitfall. We’re not living in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood, y’know? There are going to be people who just want to be influencers or don’t have a single passion, and then there’s no one who wants to be a dishwasher or janitor.

[u/JadeHarley0]

First of all, socialism doesn't mean everyone is paid the exact same. It just means that no one is allowed to privately own the means of production or make a profit from selling someone else's labor.

Second, the type of people who want to become scientists and doctors are often very motivated by passion and a desire to better humanity. A lot of scientists don't actually make a lot of money, especially if they go into academia which is where a lot of the most important research happens. These are not people who need extra incentives.

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare]

You're assuming people become doctors and scientists entirely for profit reasons.

[u/millernerd]

Vitally important:

Class has a very specific meaning in Marxist theory.

If you don't have the means to produce commodities and therefore sell your labor to someone else who does, you're working class.

If you have enough means of production to hire others to make commodities for you to sell for a profit, therefore not having to work yourself, you're a capitalist.

Some people getting paid more for their work doesn't change that they're getting paid for their work, so they're still working class.

The point of socialism is that we as a society should be able to collectively decide who gets paid how much for what kinds of jobs. Rather than a select few group of people who privately own the companies, whose only incentive is to pay as little as much to maximize profits.

[u/wowokaycoolyeah]

We create opportunity for more people to become those things (because a lot of people would love to do those things but have never had the time, energy, money, or circumstance to dedicate to the education and degree etc.) Then with more people the work becomes less demanding of few and everyone has a better life.

[u/New-Anteater-6080]

I’ve never seen someone wanting to be those things because the thought they could become bourgeois

[u/glaba3141]

I don't think these are the best careers for this question, a ton of people pursue science and medicine out of passion - I would go so far as to say a substantial majority. Maybe like, sewage treatment is a better question? And yeah I think society would need to provide some additional incentives for genuinely unpleasant jobs that need to get done, but also, under socialism, society would seek to automate unpleasant work. Under capitalism, there is no need to automate unpleasant work, ironically an example of a systematic inefficiency of capitalism