>>Why does the prospect of doing ones fair share of unpleasant work have to
>>come across as some sort of dystopian nightmare out of science fiction?
>
Then Bill Bartlett wrote:
>Aside from the principle of it, its the mechanics of it. Who decides what
is a fair share of the unpleasant >work and how do they decide, how are
these decisions enforced and how are people's work going to be
>monitored?
Then steve wrote:
Everyone decides. If you couldn't convince a majority to go along with this hypothetical project, it wouldn't work. If you're asking me exactly how the councils are organized, how the polity functions, I really don't know much about it. Ask Gar Lipow, who seems to know a lot, or have someone post a question to Albert or Hahnel over at the sustainer forums. How are people monitored? I dunno what others would say, but maybe the same way I am monitored at work. By my coworkers. If I don't get the dishes to the cooks in time, they remind me of my responsibility. If they don't bring their pots back to the dishroom in time, they will certainly be hearing from me. The same goes for waitresses who leave their sidework for me to do when I close for the night. People who slack off are warned, warned again, and fired. You know, just like in real life. My workplace is a little unusual in that management mostly stays out the way, but I think you get the idea.
More Bill:
>As Justin says, the whole thing would entail a large manpower of
administrative lawyers and massive bureaucracies.
>
>But the notion is ill-conceived to begin with, the object of socialism is
not to reduce the ruling class to >proletarians,
Steve:
i fail to see how BJCs do this
Bill:
>but to make the proletariat as free as the present ruling class.
Steve:
BJCs, ideally, bring everyone up a notch (almost everyone, anyway), as you say you hope socialism would, but they don't make everyone "as free as the ruling class." Why? The freedom of the ruling class depends on the enslavement of everyone else. A trust fund baby with a billion dollars and a private jet is very "free," but how can you expect _any_ economic system, short of one that includes magic lamps, to grant total freedom to every person?
Bill:
>These sort of bleak and depressing visions of socialism are a slur, I
sometimes wonder if they might not be >black propaganda put out by the
class enemy.
Steve:
Well that's an interesting theory, i suppose.
And a little later, Bill wrote, in response to Andie:
>Its true, aside from the fact it is merely a waste of special training,
To my mind, this is a choice between "wasting" training and wasting human beings. A life of dishwashing in some sense wastes a good part of the worker's potential for creative work. At the same time it does very real damage to his or her intelligence and physical as well as mental health.
>there are a couple of even bigger inefficiencies.
>
>First of all, I should think a person who is doing work they don't have
any particular ,,motivation or aptitude for, will not be very productive.
>
I don't see how Parecon forces people into work they have no motivation or aptitude for any more than the present system does, in fact much less so. Unless you think that all those people pushing brooms 40, 50 hours a week have no motivation or aptitude, or potential aptitude, given access to education and job training.
>But I think perhaps the biggest inefficiency involved is the enormous
inefficiency inherent in any system >that MAKES people do work.
Where are the magic lamps? The armies of robot-slaves? I've heard these "workless" socialism theories before. They remind me of Objectivism in the way they treat all social obligations as slavery.
> The burden of administration, monitoring and policing of such a system is
enormous in purely efficiency
>terms, never mind destructive in social terms.
I would expect council democracy to cut management costs tremendously.
>>This is not a point about intellectuals. My sister is
>>a union carpenter -- a skilled worker. It takes seven
>>years as an apprentice to make a journeyman carpenter.
>>She's a skilled tradeswoman. It wouls also be
>>inefficient to make her clean toilets instead of
>>having her build houses.
>
>What I don't really follow in this debate is why it is expected that there
must be someone to clean toilets.
>Why can't people clean their own toilets anyhow, why does it need to be
someone's job?
1 We can't do away with division of labor unless we want to revert to subsistence farming.
2 I'm talking about public toilets, not the toilets in your house.