>This kind of fantasy is hardly limited to "leftists."
no, but when people with ostensibly leftist --broadly understood--sympathies do this slumming thing to get down with the people it's unconscionable. we just got treated to a fine display of a leftist romanticizing life on the land that put to shame the final scene of 'grapes of wrath'. i was deeply ambivalent about that discussion and, had i not been so busy, i might have written about the 'gentrifying' lefties that have bought up acres upon acres of dying farmsteads by the 100s in and around tompkins county, ny--home of ithaca and cornell--the berkeley [gag] of the east. park some goats, sheep and/or chickens on the back 40 and ya got yerself a tax write off because that and a fresh coat of country white on that greek revival farmhouse will get you the designation of "farmer"! and then you can go to town meetings, the 'farmer's market' and the veteran's day parade and mock all the farmers with their backward, racist, sexist, nationalist beliefs who you call white trash and hicks to your friends.
and don't friggen anyone tell me that this doesn't happen. not only did i have the pleasure of catering 4th of july bbq's for these types where i heard such things regularly, but i have been treated to the same kind of talk at job interviews at uni's--as a prelude to a discussion of a course on 'social inequalities' blah blah blah--as well as socialist, leftist, etc meetings through the years.
>leftists are probably more sensitivte to/guilty about any such
>identifications than are nonleftists.
that and a dollar will get you a bottle of snapple.
i'm not saying that anyone on this list is guilty of all of the above. but i was ambivalent about the romanticization because i too love farming. i didn't grow up on a farm. i did, however, end up spending the majority of my adult life living in a low income housing tract built on what was once a swamp in the midst of three family-run dairy farms. i spent enough of my spare time helping them with haying, chasing down livestock and the like to know that running a dairy farm isn't a hobby. it's damn hard and dangerous work--my neighbor's has a hook on his left arm that is testimony to that, as is the death of two classmates in highschool who got chewed up in farm machinery. anyway, i worked a 1000 sq ft of garden every year--not as some friggin hobby but as a way to survive: canning and freezing and drying the produce, as well as selling some of it on a roadside stand. i also used to make some cash picking wild berries for the she-she restaurants in ithaca. how quaint. but the fact was i didn't have a choice, really. it was that or work in a job with a base of 55 salaried hrs/ $180/week [1987].
it's rather apalling to listen to people talk about these things as if it's 'voluntary'. i'm sure the point is that it would be nice were it voluntary in our socialist utopia, but i suspect that max's point about how we manage to get people to do work that they might not otherwise do is an important one to think about. brett's answer, which i had much sympathy for, was that ppl don't have to do anything they don't want to and they'[ll suffer the consequences. well, i guess max's point is that this is still a form of "market logic" --rational choice logic, utilitarian cost-benefit calculation.
for me, the answer to max's concerns is that the point would be to bring about the conditions in which people work for reasons other thant self-interest maximization. the feminist lit in the regard is helpful. yes, it's utopian specualtion but i think it quite possible that people will work and enjoy their work when they have some autonomy over the conditions in which they labor and the reasons for doing so. did your moms and dads wipe your butt because they were going to get something out of it?
also, brett, i'd say that your puzzlement over why anyone would take a cut in pay is puzzling to me. i've done just that before. i was working in a family-run business where the operative logic wasn't completely one of stark self-interest maximization. that sort of attitude encouraged a different way of thinking among employees. that, i suspect, would change things considerably under a anarcho-socialist economy.
btw, listerine, epsom salts, and dishsoap always made a fine cocktail for keeping the bugs at bay.
kelley