>>> Doug Henwood remarked:
I'm very grateful that I don't have to spend my life digging ditches or cleaning bedpans, both of which are socially useful but which I'd find as pretty indistinguishable from a prison sentence if I had to do them 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Maybe it's just my decadent petit bourgeois temperament speaking.
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CB: I've done some heavy physical labor, but I am a predominantly paper pushing-gazing laborer. I wouldn't want to dig ditches or clean bedpans 40 or 50 hours per week either.
I don't mean to be a goodie two-shoes or the like, but I do think it would be good if we could arrange production such that we predominantly intellectual workers spent time in physical labor, and vica versa, such that the different work types along the physical-mental predominance spectrem were spread out over the whole population more. It wouldn't have to be quite as harsh as the Chinese Cultural Revolution (though that is part of the historical trial and error of it). I see the reduction of the antagonism between mental and physical laborers as obviously movement of each in the other's direction. Everybody would be an intellectual in socialism, and everybody would be a "manual" laborer.
It seems a copout for me to think ,"I don't want to do the dirty work for 40 or 50 hours per week, but if I don't do some , then somebody else will have to do the dirty work for 40 or 50 hours per week."
Then the principle from each according to ability to each according to need would also organize the process.
Overall, we would be constantly seeking to advance technology so that no one had to toil or do arduous or smelly physical ( or mental for that matter) labor.
Also, as of today , 2000, I don't think we can ignore the fact that there has been a long history of elitism associated with mental labor relative to physical labor ( using those terms roughly). Although many mental laborers are wage-laborers now, left intellectuals should remain sensitive to this larger historical pattern. Higher education is still correlated with privilege.
Any leftist and radical intellectuals who sincerely want to have their ideas accepted and respected, adopted even, and their intellectual emphasis emulated by the many unintellectuals will not succeed without a sense of the long history and common sense association of brainwork with privilege and rank and snobbery. So, for vulgar communism, with more respect by fancy communism.