> Our societies are complex, but the job market idea is bone simple. Divide
> the amount of work among those seeking it--shortening work hours so everyone
> has a job? Let individual workers decide what the work is worth to them,
> making prices fairly reflect the human cost of production? Do this by taking
> away the legal right of employers to set wages and work hours? Technicaly,
> these are all fairly simple to carry out, although the software would be
> complicated.
It's not simple to bring society into a state of affairs where these things are operating as the norm. I could also say, regarding the "abolition of the wage system" system I mentioned, that it's "simple" for people to exchange labor, or the products of labor, and draw what they need from public depots on an as-needed basis. getting us to that, like getting us to your system of wages set with software or other decision making structures, is not simple.
> The question we're trying to answer is, in a complicated industrialized
> society, how do you arrange work with minimal exploitation and maximal
> freedom, without losing the organizational and productive capacity which
> creates many benefits that we want.
Yes, greater outputs with less inputs = good thing.
> (Some solve it by saying we don't want
> an industrialized society, you know, no airplanes if people don't want to
> make them.
Yes - primitivists. Zerzan, Kaczynski, and the like.
> There's this idea that the only way you can have something like an aircraft
> factory is under capitalism or, as they call it, 'command socialism'. In
> other words, people have to be organized into doing it, probably coerced, and
> that's just the way it is. No coercion, no aircraft.
Chuck0 and I had an exchange over the aircraft thing last Fall on this list, as you may remember. He said no, there should be no aircraft in a future society. I said it'd depend on workers' wishes.
> As for viability, here I'm going to interpret you to mean political
> viability. I'd say all these "models of intermediate social orders" have one
> goal right now, and that's educational.
But educating people to do WHAT to get to this system you've described? In "gently" suggesting that we need intermediate systems like the one you've described before we get to a society where the wage system has been abolshed, it's as if you've suggested the plan you're describing is more practical. Okay - what are the practical means for getting there as opposed to anywhere else?
Organize in workplaces? And if so, along what lines and in regard to what principles? Organizing housing co-ops? Etc. I could als say "education" would help us abolish the wage system, and I'd be right, too.
Brian
--
"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Il etait enfin venu, le jour ou je fus un pourceau!" - Comte de Lautreamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, 4th Hymn, Strophe 6