Well, that's a persuasive argument. I _have_ been called a geek, but I don't think the issue can be dismissed, either as point of ideological struggle in dealing with people who are a lot less sympathetic to left wing ideas than I am, or in thinking about alternative forms of social and economic organization.
>The idea of any revolutionary struggle is to begin the process of
>reorganizing society and the economy along more rational and humane lines
>-- to phase out or at least minimize onerous, numbing and
>debilitating labour in order to maximize free time and leisure as much as
>is materially possible.
And this shows that the free rider problem is not a problem? There is the small point that necessary labor will not go away.
>Something about fishing in the morning and philosophizing in the evening, I
>believe.
I may have read something of the sort. How does taht help?
>The point is that *we*
>will be able to decide collectively both the nature of work and the amount
>required -- democratically and collectively weighing the benifits with the
>costs of any particular economic plan or set of
>priorities.
OK, so your idea is then that the coercion involved in overcoming the free rider problem is to imposed democratically? I support that.
>an obvious point -- that people should be
>able to engage in useful work or activities that they find meaningful and
>then share out whatever little of the distasteful work is left over. It
>wouldnt take much to get people to work such jobs if their
>obligations were light - a few hours say-- all the while still having
>access to the material comforts of modern life.
OK, so this is your solution. But you underestimate how much distasteful work will be left over. That is because, even if we can reduce a lot of dirty and dangerous or mind-numbing and repetitive work to a minimum, first, there is the problem of getting people to do that much. You heard our anarchists--_they_ won't work in a factory! ANd second, even work that (like mine) is relatively pleasant or even very engaging may look less attractive compared with doing something else, like hanging out. Look at our universities, full of professors who could be thinking and writing, but who go to sleep after they get tenure. If they didn't have to teach to get paid (and teaching is wonderful), a lot of them wouldn't show up in the classroom at all. I myself often mind myself arguing on line instead of writing things I'm supposed to and would indeed, realtively, enjoy writing. A point made by the "fish in the morning" fellow that you seem to have forgotten is that free labor is, as he put it "damned hard work!"
I So the question Justin is why you're obsessing over non-issues like the
threat posed by Malibu
>surfers-- what should at best be a marginal issue, at least for those of
>us in the advanced industrial world.
Because I don't think they are nonissues.
>Most of what discipline may be necessary can largely arise out of the fact
>that people are
>social beings(!) -- and subject to all sorts of social pressures due to
>their socialization -- and are not little ahistorical bundles of
>egotistical impulses ready to explode and devour all of civilization
>if given half a chance.
As noted, you need no such assumptions to get the free rider problemoff the ground. All you need is a very weak and general tendency for people to prefer that others do stuff that is hard or comparatively unattractive.
>Really! for you to obssess over the need for 'work-police' says more about
>youre hang-ups than about any serious or inherent barrier to a truly
>libertarian society.
>
This sort of personalization,a long with the imputations about my immaturity and geekiness, as well as my general stupidity and ideological blinkeredness, is unconstructive. If I were to respond in kind, I would say that it says something about you that you can't respond to a serious problem for a small-l-libertarian society without disparaging the messenger.
>Now I should probably qualify the above discussion and point out that what
>we're really speaking about is a relatively advanced economy here, and that
>a less developed economy with a lower technological and
>material base and marked by conditions of severe material scarcity, would
>probably require a greater amount of external discipline to be exerted on
>labour(preferably in the form of greater differential
>rewards based on effort) and would probably require a culture fostering a
>more intense 'internal' discipline -- expressed in the form of a more
>puritanical culture -- than one would expect in a post
>revolutionary society in the West.
>
History is against you on this one. Early modern Europe had far less external discipline, despite futile attempts to impose it by law with vagabondage laws and the like. People in the 1500s worked maybe 150 days a year, "St. Monday" was regularly observed, feast daysd were frequent, the level of effort--and technological development and productivity--was low. You help yourself to the high technology and high productivity created by the impositiona nd internalizatioon of labor discipline created by markets,a nd then suppose,w ithout good reason that I can see, that this would continue without the conditions that createdit.
> >
>Man, I can almost see your face -- all scrunched up and severe-- as you
>typed out the words "coercion" and "police". You know if I were a Freudian
>Justin I'd probably point out the almost anal preoccupation
>you seem to have with goof-offs, malibu surfers and general layabouts --
>but I'm not so i'll let it go at that.
And if I were easily offended, I'd tell you fuck off, but I'm not, and besides, I try to have good manners and not psychoanlyse people I don't know.
>>pradeep,
>the-"I-dont-want-to-be-a-part-of-your-revolution-if-I-have-to-get-up-before-noon"-slacker
>
>
Justin, the boulevardier who thinks that if a postcapitalist society can't get people like me out of the cafes and people like Pradeep back to work, it won't work
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