>Can't imagine why, since we all do all these things already. I'm a lawyer/Dad/housecleaner/shopper, etc
But your paid job is as a lawyer. And lawyer/ice cream vendor is a witty poke at the idea of balance job complexes rather than a description. (And I'm absolutely not against witty pokes in argument; makes the discussion less dull.
More likely would be lawyer/data entry. If as a lawyer (and I know most lawyers do most of their own typing these days) you are not qualified to do data entry, you could be easily trained.
>Of course there's a touch of "send the intellectuals to the countryside" Maoism in the Parecon proposal,
Not a big touch. Parecon is changing the subject a bit though. Lot's of people who share the coordinator class analysis don't think much of Parecon. Barbara Ehrenreich is strong on this analysis, but I'm pretty sure she would support market socialism. Well, if we actually had a chance of winning it, I'd support democratic market socialism of your type over capitalism in a NY second.
>but I'm not actually sure that it was altogether a bad idea to send send the intellectuals to the countryside. From ones I know who were sent, they weren't much use to the farmers, except for one mathematician.
I agree - one of the many things Maoist got wrong; balancing work should not mean an end to specialization nor anti intellectualism. It just means that everyone gets a fair share of both the rote and fun stuff related to their particular job and ability.
> I knew, but they learned a lot themselves. There is a connected question about what's the best way to have people use their labor power: people like my mathematician friend who have no farming training tend to make poor farmers; I am perfectly capable to doing mass photocopying, but is that really the best way to put my skills to use?
I would agree that farming is a poor use for a mathematicians skill, given the likely areas where her talents probably lie. But I'll bet there are rote areas your friend could handle. Now as to the second point; you are perfectly capable of doing photocopying - so is it a waste of your talents for you do photocopying when you could be doing lawyering? It is if you assume the *person* doing photocopying if you don't has no better capabilities. If you assume that, (excluding a tiny minority of clinical cases), everybody has talent to do creative, empowering work, that nobody is so narrow in capabilities that they are only capable of dull, rote work then it is not a waste for your time to spend some of it on photocopying. Because spending some of your time on photocopying means the person who now spends all her time on photocopying
>ANyway, the main point is that there will be plenty of room for lawyers, bureaucrats, economists, and other malign times in parecon or any nonmarket system. jks
Never denied that the work will need to be done. In general Parecon does not share the romantic idea some anarchists have that these function are not necessary. The point is to share the different types of labor (without eliminating specialization; there is plenty of empowering work and plenty of rote work in all specialties I know of). In short we just want to share the fun, not eliminate it. And I suspect if we start sharing the rote work more evenly, we will make much quicker progress in finding ways to eliminate it. In a way Parecon might end up being the triumph of the coordinator class -in which enough rote work was eliminated that everyone was a coordinator. Michael Perlman has done a lot of great work showing that in many cases technological improvement has not followed the optimum path for improving productivity, because increasing control was a higher priority.
> Wrong and incoherent. They buy workers' labor power, their ability to work, for a period of time. To say they buy worker's "time" makes literally no sense. They want the workers to work for a certain period. But (as Marx saw) they cannot buy a period of labor, because labor is variable. Therefore they buy the workers' capacity to work from 9 to 5, set about extracting the maximum labor they can from their acquisition.
Fair enough; you caught me a sloppy paraphrase of Marx. They buy labor power, and set out to extract the maximum labor they can from their acquisition.
>So what makes this group of people one "class," particularly since it encompasses a great number of people in wildly divergent situatiosn?
Whereas construction workers, receptionists, waiters, factory workers, data entry clerks, bartenders, cab drivers, coal miners, farm workers, stagehands, circus clowns (whom we all acknowledge to be in the same class) are not in wildly divergent situations?
>Btw, I like the relentless negative picture of everyone in this "class": apparently all teachers do is to produce obedient drones,
Nope - I specifically mention research and production of skills.
> all managers to is to police workers,
Having worked in the corporate world for many years, I am really really tempted to say yes. But of course managers perform many valid functions. I never said coordination is not needed just that the coordinator tasks should be divide among the coordinated.
>all engineers do is to deskill labor. In the Brave New World, whena ll of thgese people have been re-educated and put to proper work as hewers of wood and drawerrs of water, the direct producers will educatie themselves, coordinate
Nope - the very word I'd use. Before I acknowledged a criticism as fair; not this one. You are misstating my position, Coordinators will get their fair share of coordinator tasks in a Parecon. It is just that they don't get to monopolize the fun. I'm a computer programmer. There is plenty of shit work involved in programming. (Can you say "documentation" children? I knew you could.) But the fact is a great deal of time I get to play for a living. I get to talk to users and figure out what they really want. I get to figure out what the problems are and sit down and solve them. I get to translate that solution into a terse artificial language, and find the most elegant way to phrase it. And yeah, then I have to debug it which again - not so fun. But the fact is at least half of my job is pure pleasure, not work. I usually end up getting a lot of information from data entry clerks who are every bit as bright as I am, and who have a real talent for computer stuff. They just never got the chance at education I got. Is it really fair they should sit all day entering data into screens, in a job that involve very little play and that more than half of my work involves fooling around? Shouldn't I have to do some of that data entry? Shouldn't they be offered training and allowed to do some of the fun stuff that I do?
> (oops! bad word, very bad, so sorry, I maen arrange)
whaaaatever..
>Gotta stop that. No, really, I know that parecon types, despite the vocabulary of ressentiment involved here, hope to increase the level of disalienated labor. Of course this is classi Marxism, but it wouldn't do to say so
Hey, you are not the only non Marxist willing to learn from Marx. Marx and Engels offer a hell of a lot. Just because I think we need to move beyond them in some areas does not mean they don't have a hell of a lot still to teach. I freely acknowledge that a lot of my viewpoint is very Marxist. Except I have to be careful, because I paraphrase him wrong.
"ressentiment"
Right - don't you know all you damn socialist types are guilty of stirring up the politics of envy?
>How is the "coordinator class" a "main class" in meaningful sense? Since it does not control any means of production, it never exercises autonomous political power. In capitalist society, the calpiatlsit class is _always_ the ruling class.
By that argument, in capitalist society the working class is not a "main class". After all it is not the ruling class either. I'm glad I'm not the only one capable of sloppy argument. You are a very smart guy, and it is really reassuring to see that your posts can be as sloppy and typewritten as mine. This means I do not have an obligation to change my on-line name to typo boy.
> Can you think of a counterexample? For that matter, an instancew here the "coodinator class" -- that misellaneous group of elementary school tecahers, government lawyers, K-mrt assistant managers,
Umm - no. Not K-mart assistant managers. Having the title of manager is not the same thing as being one.
> and university professors -- won a serious victory over capital? I think not. Frankly, that group has never neen organized.
Hmm - I would say for example that tenure is a serious victory against capital. Our U.S. whole university system, was for much of its existence a coordinator victory. Elementary, middle and high schools, as unequally funded as they are are open to everyone regardless of "merit". If you are not at high school level, and you are of high school age, they can't say "go away, not eligible". It is the obligation of the high school to compensate for whatever has gone wrong in your education to date, and bring you up to high school level. More honored in the breach than the practice - but still fundamental to our system. But when it comes to university admissions, suddenly it is all about "merit". With exceptions for a rapidly shrinking affirmative action program, and a rapidly growing "alumni" affirmative action program, whether you go to the university, and what university you go to depends on a mixture of wealth and prior education. There are very few universities that simply offer open admissions, and help make those unqualified qualified. And OK, you don't want to waste an expensive medical or legal education on someone certain to flunk out. Enough of the well prepared manage that. But the fact is that above a certain level, combine test scores and grades predict very little. A fairer admission method would be to admit everyone (or a randomly chosen subset, weighted by race, gender, class, disability and other important considerations) above a certain minimum qualification - and have free programs available to allow those who do not qualify to improve. And I don't see a huge coordinator swell against it. The fact it is very much a coordinator weighted system. The wealthy can buy their way in; it is still capitalism. I never claimed this was a coordinator ruled society. But coordinators can get access to decent education and earn their way in through grades and test score. Working people have one hell of a time doing that - not because they are any less intelligent than those from a middle class background but because they have to work twice as hard to get access to a decent education, and can't afford special tutoring to raise those test scores.
>What rubbish. Most "ccordinators" have no special privileges. You're confusing people like me (vastly overpaid big firm lawyers) with typical"coordinators," an incoherent group that mainly consist of white collar proletariat whose only significant different from blue collar proles may be ajunior college degree and a bit of supervisory authority.
Nope - if I include those I would be talking about a coordinator population of 20-30% not 10-20%. There is a difference between a transmission belt and a manager. As you yourself pointed out there are real task managers perform that are needed in any society - coordination sums it up nicely. I'll use the example of a Safeway manager rather that a K-mart manager, because the Safeway manager is my neighbor whom I know. A lot of his time time is checking off little boxes of what policy says his people are supposed to do against what they ought to do according to the rule books, and talking to them when they depart from it. There is also the question of scheduling which can 90% be done a spreadsheet he has set up, and only has to be done manually when someone needs special treatment due to special circumstances. He tell me that if robots get could enough, about 80% of his job could be done by a robot.
He is not a coordinator. And I know you folks will jump on the fuzziness of this - but this just gets back to the something we have already agreed on. We are identifying groups, not classifying individuals. Classic Marxism produces fuzzy cases as well. How about a top manager paid a million a year? Nominally a worker or coordinator (depending on definition) - but in practice a capitalist. Note that only Engels defined the term "middle class". I think Marx had an uneasy feeling on the subject, and carefully avoided definitions in discussion of the subject.
> And if we can't persuade those peple to support socialism, we might as well hang it up. It's hard to be optimistic Frankly, I know more more red big firm lawyers than socialists of real proletarian background and occupation.
Could that be because most forms of socialism advocated are coordinator biased. Coordinators might see more gain from the elimination of capitalism in these scenarios than ordinary workers would? You know, even putting aside the whole coordinator debate, that is a statement of Carrollingian pessimism. Suppose almost everyone who is not a capitalist is in fact working class - something I vehemently do not concede. You still can't tell me we will ever win social democratic reform, let alone any form of socialism, if we win support only in the top ten to twenty percent of the working class? We (whoever we are) need to find a way to appeal to that bottom 80%. Right now their probably are more red lawyers than red data entry clerks. If that does not change, then we damn well won't win socialism, or social democracy, or even liberalism.
Yoshie:
>he AMA and the like have reflected the interests of petty producers, though they might change in the future, as petty producers have begun to lose autonomy and become proletarianized. Just because becoming a sociology professor and becoming a medical doctor with private practice both take years of post-graduate education doesn't mean that they are necessarily in the same class.
I think you need to use present, not future tense here. More and more doctors are employees not in private practice. (I think this is true of lawyers too, but I've kept up less on this.) More to the point, most young doctors in private practice are only nominally independent - in practice keeping that portion of their profit that the managed care organizations and HMO's allow, and operating under the very rigid regulations they provide. And if the middle class consists mainly of petty producers, they would indeed have mostly been proletarianized by now, and we would probably have socialism in Europe and social democracy in the U.S.
>Below the most abstract level of analysis of the mode of production, we might possibly employ the following categorization:
>(A) Capital
>(B) Petty Producers (professionals with private practices, peasants, self-employed shop-keepers, etc.), many of whom are increasingly proletarianized
>(C) the Working Class (be they employed or unemployed, better paid or worse paid than the average, with more or less autonomy than the average)
>(B') + (C') Capital's Hangers-on (tiny fractions of petty producers and wage workers whose labor _solely_ consists in extracting work from workers -- e.g., deans, provosts, union-busting lawyers and consultants, death squads, etc.)
>(B) is marginal in number in G8 nations. Peasants in developing nations _are_ still numerically important, but many of them know where they stand in the big class picture and side with the working class, sometimes led by and sometimes leading the latter.
Are you really saying a professor of sociology has more in common with a coal miner than a doctor? If you look at actual interests and consciousness - the coordinator class as I've defined has more common interests and ways of thinking than the working class as you've defined it. There are no magic lines connecting people in a common class together. It is shared interests and consciousness.
>What you (or Parecon theorists) call "a coordinator class" is ill defined, and the bogus category ill serves class struggles, as it bundles together those whose labor _solely_ consists in extracting work from workers _and_ the workers and petty producers who are subject to them.
OK, ya know if you really want debate Parecon, right now, let me suggest that we take it offlist, do a private e-mail debate, post it on a website and send the link to the list. Because I have a feeling that only a tiny minority of us are interested in that. The question of class analysis I think goes way beyond Parecon advocates or even anarchists and autonomist Marxists. It has been a minority view among leftists of all stripes, and is of fairly broad interest on this list. And it seems to me that which category better serves class struggle is exactly what we are debating.
>Somehow, parecon theorists think like the most boneheaded Maoists when it comes to what they might think of as "middle class," intellectuals, etc.! Perhaps, parecon and anarchism are a Maoist for those who hate Maoists.
Only if I let you and Justin define what I think. I'm going to plagiarize myself; those are not straw men you folks are creating; they are full fledged singing, dancing, if-I-only-had-a-brain scarecrows.