sounds like a load of organicist claptrap to me. And also extremely masculinist - I don't see any evocation of the beauties of cooking and cleaning and caregiving, just the manly pursuit of grunting toil.
Doug
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Sorry the reply had to wait. I went to work today, manually laboring, by fixing power wheelchairs so the effete and erudite motorized Wilde's of Oakland could gallivant around town to get their christmas shopping done.
Masculinist? I did mention child birth as labor didn't I? And you did get a good recipe for fish stew at the end of the post, remember?
But there is nothing I wrote that I haven't done side by side with women. The difference between men and women isn't a matter of raw strength, which burns off fast. If you try to muscle a job you're foolish and won't last after a few minutes. The only difference between men and women is in adapting the size of each load. This is actually not a gender difference, but a body scale difference. Smaller and lighter framed men (like me, for example) move smaller loads more often. I suspect smaller people are better at extremely heavy labor, because they are physiologically more efficient in some ways. Take a look at sherpas in the Himalayas or indians in Peru--they have similar builds--skinny, short--like me. The rest of it is a cultivation of gravity, timing, and endurance. This goes (somewhat) for cycling and climbing. Notice that these sports do not require absolute strength, but an advantageous relative strength to body weight ratio. But I think there is a bio-mechanical advantage to longer legs in cycling and longer reach in climbing.
In case Doug and Yoshie have to abandon their delicate left life styles in some future shock, and find themselves in a Rightwing final solution---for example, condemned to a for-profit prison road gang, for re-education---I wrote a rather lengthy post on how to dig a hole and survive. I decided it was too long and boring to post. If you think you might need it, I'll put it up.
I was half joking and half not joking about manual labor. There is something elemental and fine about it. Learning how to work the body against something that is completely impossible--I don't know, it's a fundamental of some sort.
As you might be able to guess, my last job between bio-tech lab and before wheelchairs was casual day laborer, breaking concrete, digging holes and loading construction debris into dump trucks--where I met a wild Brazilian labor crew and an all woman landscaping crew---both of whom were excellent dirt movers. Both had fine and joyful spirits--much, much different than the usual dower old construction crews. We had a great time working together.
But there is a kind of theoretical point too. Being able to dig a straight square trench at X feet deep, knowing how to break up a concrete slab and load it all in a truck--does something to your concept of capital--puts the fundamental lie to it. Not just as exploitation, but capital as the material possession of anything at all. And this something, whatever it is, is sort of the road of insight into how to organize labor. It is more than just shared toil. It is a kind of mutual knowledge that the assholes in suits are meaningless on some more realistic level: the world is changed by moving its material stuff, its dirt and rocks.
Chuck Grimes