> Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 12:30:10 -0500
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: "Central "Planning is really Holistic Planning.
>
> Joe R. Golowka wrote:
>
>
>> > So who will have the power to prevent bureaucracies from reappearing once
>>we have
>>
>>> anarchism?
>>>
>>Everyone.
>>
>
> And you don't see that as a problem? If everyone is responsible, is
> anyone? No division of labor in your utopia? No mechanism of
> authority with accountability? When I hear things like this, I think
> of Nancy Folbre's critique of the Albert/Hahnel parecon model - it's
> a vision of life as one long student council meeting.
>
> Doug
It is a very funny critique - but not a particularly fair one. In point of fact most planning under parecon is not done at meetings. It is done in an iterative process similar to a markets adjustment of supply and demand. I will be glad to post a summary of the details.
Or perhaps the objection is to the fact the decision within the workplace are made democratically, I don't believe that could be what is mean't since the same criticism could be made of market socialism. That is, presumably, under market socialim workers democratically run their own workplaces - hiring and firing managers if they are not completely self-managing.
>
>
> Chuck0 wrote:
>
>
>Didn't we go over this several months ago? It's not just a matter of
>advocating "small is better" but freedom for the individual. If the
>individual still has to go to some alienating factory job, what's the
>fucking difference if it is called socialism or capitalism? Of course,
>there is no difference, which is why socialists have been called the
>left wing of capital for good reasons.
As Kelley says below - factory work does not neccesarily have to be alienating.
>
kelley wrote
>
> i tend toward this view, myself, because one of the things marx meant by
> alienation wasn't that it was mind-numbing or dirty or boring work, but
> that it could be mind-numbing, dirty, and boring to us because we didn't
> understand its part in the bigger picture. we didn't understand how what we
> did was related to what everyone else did. we didn't understand how we need
> each other. we didn't understand how the things we created were actually
> created, where the wood we worked came from (the loggers who had to fell
> the trees, the factory workers that cut it to size, the sales staff that
> sells it, the truck driver that delivers it).
>
> people alienated because they don't have control over what, how, and why
> they do what they do. it might be perfectly reasonable to find that people
> _like_ working in factory production doing things that you think are
> tedious and incredibly boring. who is anyone to say that people who say
> they are happy at the tech support desk, aren't? someone wrote me the other
> day to say that she LOVED writing marketing droid copy. thrills her. she
> likes coming up with witty one liners such as "take your shoes off your
> mind" [(c) Melody Akins}. she's creative. would she be much more satisfied
> writing fiction? i don't know. is she only thrilled because she's falsely
> conscious. in part, yes, but not entirely.
>
> it seems to me that the issue is about collective ownership, which doesn't
> necessarily depend on smallness. we could have large-scale product where
> there is substantive participation in the nitty gritty details of how one's
> work is done, as well as more episodic forums for discussing the bigger
> picture. if anarchists can do it now, organizing people from all over to
> discuss what and how they will proceed, then it can surely be done in a
> workplace.
>
> it is also about understanding how one's work is important to society as a
> whole. that's more difficult to accomplish, but i think those kinds of
> institutions and practices will evolve. one way to achieve that is have
> people work in several different roles. this avoids the tedium of doing the
> same thing all the time. it also provides people with opportunities to
> learn new things. finally, it provides people with a better understanding
> of how each job impacts on others. the software engineer should work the
> tech support desk. the tech support person should participate on a software
> development project, perhaps as an assistant, at first, mentored by those
> with more specialized skills. the tech support person should learn how to
> manage a project or coordinate other people's work. everyone should mop the
> floors and scrub the toilet. etc.
>
> hard to implement? you bet. but it would be worth it. can we do it with
> 10,000 people. the same freakin way it gets done among anarchists all over
> the world. very substantive democracratic participation in what is going on
> and why. fact is, though, i suspect all the time savings we earn from
> reducing socially necessary labor time would be used toward making this
> substantive participation possible.
>
> the other problem is enforcing your desire carl. how much would it be
> perceived as scutt work. how many people would try to get out of doing it?
> maybe i'm wrong, but don't people in sweden, etc try to get out of paying
> their taxes? why wouldn't they try to get out of loading garbage trucks?
> what levels of enforcement are we willing to accept to make what you're
> suggesting possible--at this wider societal level you've envisioned.
Hi kelley. I would just suggest that one way to enforce able people doing their share of the scut work is to not pay them if they don't. Yes this is Justin's "they who work not shall not eat". But is seems both perfectly reasonable, and a lot less coercive than holding a gun to someones head and saying "you will clean this floor". And as long as we can't eliminate the scut work I think it is fair that it be shared more or less evenly betwwen those able to do it. And, I don't think we will be able to completely eliminate it even by changing attitudes. Writing Ad copy is still creative work. So is cooking. Washing the dishes may even give a certain pleasure -- as it is rhythmic, and not a huge physical strain. But I don't think anyone will ever develop a mind set that enjoys scrubbing toilets..
>
> kelley
>