Hard work

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>  >>> 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.
>((((((((((
>
>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.

Are post-Soviet Russian doctors growing potatoes for survival better 
doctors now than they used to be, because they are now intimately 
acquainted with the sort of "manual labor" that must have been 
foreign to them in the Soviet past?

Yoshie