My megaproject ideas are mostly pretty standard. I'd build a high speed rail network across North America, and build and expand metro and regional rail systems in and around every city. I'd turn all cities and suburbs into fifteen-minute cities. I'd decommodify housing, and build ten million units of public/social/non-market housing, mostly three bedroom units. I'd link those last three policies together by building TODs around the new Metro and rail stops. And I'd build bicycle networks in every town and city and connect them to the TODs. I'd build bridges and walkways across skyscrapers. I'd put a bidet in every American toilet (uses less water than toilet paper apart from being more comfortable). Fiber internet in every home. A heat pump in every home. An induction stove in every kitchen. Phase out fossil fuels and power everything with Pumped Storage Hydropower and Geothermal. I'd make the US go Metric.
But my truly crazy, obsessive idea would be to bring back the French Revolutionary calendar. Or I'd purge all French influences from English.
This is conpletely serious but definitely a crank answer:
Create a network of Greenways on the scale of our railroads and interstates, carving out huge swaths of cities and connecting every state and national forest and park.
Then maintain the ecological integrity of these Greenways by making practical indigenous land management and foraging mandatory topics in schools.
I will also maintain a small army of engineers to run clean, running water through the greenways (for handwashing) as well as an army of pilots and EMTs to make sure the Greenway dwellers have access to modern medical infrastructure.
Again, I am completely serious.
Use elevated monorails for your mass transit solution so you can run transit over the greenways with minimal impact at the ground level!
I love it! Isn't regular rail more efficient though? Both can be elevated. Or are we talking monorail just for thr retro future vibes?
seems like it would be more practical to just have civil service jobs to maintain them and teach how to maintain them to people that take the job
Part of the point of this project is to allow people to opt out of "having a job." The dichotomy between work and leisure is underexamined and imo leads a lot of people towards unhealthy self denial and compartmentalization.
Additionally, the division of labor where each person is not a human who sometimes does ecological restoration, but an ecologist is foundational to class division (at least in Marx). By attacking those divisions and allowing people to heard sheep in the morning and write criticism by night, without ever becoming a heardsman ot a critic, we can attack the very foundations of class society.
Finally, by training everyone to be in relationship with ecological systems, we create a system where everyone has a stake in preventing ecocide. It would be a thorough preventative against the kind of ecological crisis we're in now
I see that point but also people do need to learn how to do certain jobs. I can't just go be a brain surgeon one morning. Or a herdsman if one morning no one decides to be a herdsman guess what we just lost all the sheep they wandered off. Ecology is also a complicated thing that might require specialised training, some form of regulation to make sure people don't abuse natural resources corruptly etc. Also if there is ecocide then we all die there is already a stake it's just that capitalism doesn't work with those kinds of concerns
and also I'm not convinced that do it whenever you feel like it is a very good way of making sure necessary things get done. The thing about work is that it takes labour to ensure that food is grown and delivered, water is extracted etc and therefore society needs to allocate that work granted a lot of work now is unecessary but the necessary work will always need to be alloted ideally in ways that are fair and maybe automation could cut down on the amount needed
I think you're confusing a bunch of distinct concepts.
Like, a job has so much that goes into it: a wage, time boundaries, a management structure, etc.
There's also other parts of a job that can be done without those things: the actual (re)productive activity, the skills associated with it. Like, you can be a landscaper as a job, or you can keep a garden.
You don't clock in to gardening, you don't report your progress to a boss, you don't get paid for it.
There's also multiple avenues for learning things. Many people learn cooking and auto maintenance in their families. People go to language learning clubs. People pick up skills on the job. People go to school. There's nothing that says that skilling needs to be in service to a job.
"Jobs" and markets are the current ways of organizing (re)productive activity in our society, but that's historically contingent.
In Marx, neither Jobs nor markets appear in his descriptions of communism. Indigenous people have and still use ritual do do certain productive activities such as controlled burns or salmon harvests. Many anarchist projects run on a volunteer basis. On the darker side, serfdom and slavery have appeared as alternatives to jobs
Insisting on the persistence of Jobs is to insist on an incomplete break with capitalism.