> But if you take away their sale people forever, you might as well just close down the company.
When you say sales people, are you talking about a merchant behind a booth? Or a PR person? The latter should not exist at all in my opinion and is definitely a useless job which does not produce anything useful for society. The social function of marketing is to direct part of the revenue stream in one direction and not another, which is only "useful" (huge quotation marks) in an economy based on private property and competition. In a cooperative economy where as long as there is food people are fed, what matters is how to produce food and maintain infrastructure and heal people, and of course culture/science/education.
> Just because we _did_ survive without certain employees for a period of time doesn't make them all useless. The long term impacts are substantial.
I agree we cannot study these problems in isolation. However, you are the one not looking at the bigger picture. Another world is possible if we stop following the laws of Capital and State which are not laws of nature. Also, to be fair, many useless jobs kept going: i would have gladly done without cops and bankers and politicians for the lockdowns (and forever) but unfortunately these bloodsucking vampires grew even more virulent. Well I guess that's how species feeding on our misery operate.
No, I'm arguing based on the assumption that a LOT of countries ARE capitalistic. And recognizing that fact and designing things to work within that framework is a reasonable approach.
> if we lived in a fair society everyone would be well-off no matter what imaginary numbers (money and markets) have decided for them today.
But we don't. And we never will. Period. Full stop. Human nature doesn't work that way. I can't even see a way that you can argue that it does with a straight face. Even if there were no bad people (and there will always be bad people), there's always luck/randomness coming into play. Life is not an can not be fair. The best we can hope for it to make it as far as we can, and mitigate the cases where it isn't.
If everyone grew their own gardens and was a vegetarian, only consuming what they grew themselves, then the people working in grocery stores wouldn't be essential. But our society doesn't do that, so they are.
Have everyone who wants help in the fields (more people like that than you think), and if my neighbors think it's useful we'll have a grocery store but without money. We'll just take turns to feed the shelves and clean the floor and worry about the logistics. And if we grew too many potatoes for our local consumption, the people from other neighborhoods may well enjoy them and have some other stuff to send in our direction as well.
Mind you, capitalism certainly has it's issues, too... but it seems to better limit the negatives than every "share everything utopia" I've read about beyond tight knit groups of friends/family. Every single large scale example of what you describe seems to end in "and then it all burned to the ground", more or less.
That is ridiculous. Many, many businesses closed, and many, many more were impacted in ways that will take years to recover from. Many employees took short term cuts in pay or benefits just so the companies they work for could survive.
Then add to that many of the jobs that couldn't be done during covid aren't useless, but the impact of not doing them scales over time. A good example of this is a sales person for a company that makes a product. Sure, if they can't bring in new clients for a few months, the company will hurt but may be ok. But if you take away their sale people forever, you might as well just close down the company.
Just because we _did_ survive without certain employees for a period of time doesn't make them all useless. The long term impacts are substantial.