I am no maoist, not even a crypto-maoist. It would be more accurate to say that I believe in a kind of "creeping democracy." In any case, this can be a productive debate, but not if we spend the whole time insulting each other.
>> >
>> >Can't imagine why,
>> >since we all do all these things
>> >already. I'm a lawyer/Dad/housecleaner/shopper,
>> etc.
>>
>>
>> Everyone has chores.
>>
>
>Your point? That the work I do for six hours a day
>after working for 10 or 12 as a lawyer doesn't count?
>
That your household chores and family duties have little to do with BJCs or the economy. Though there are significant points of intersections, they are mostly distinct spheres for the purposes of parecon as i understand. This may be an imperfect understand, but imagine demanding minimum wage to beautify your own house for eight hours a day...it wouldn't go over, for obvious reasons. This is not to say that a good economy might not make allowances for people in extraordinary or difficult circumstances: large families, single mothers and fathers, parents of disabled children, etc etc
>>
>> >Of course there's a touch of "send the
>> intellectuals
>> >to the countryside" Maoism in the Parecon proposal,
>>
>>
>> Sure, but it's not maoist tokenism, it's intended as
>> a permanent
>> institutional change.
>
>I'd like you to explain to some of my friends who were
>sent to the countryside for YEARS taht they were
>merely engaged in Maoist tokenism.
>>
I don't know your friends. I mean "tokenism" in the sense that these programs were designed primarily to effect a change in the consciousness of intellectuals, not to create a permament change in the material conditions of their existence for the rest of their working lives. If I have misunderstood, I will quite cheerily concede that the above remark belongs in the "my bad" column.
>>
>>
>> -If "real work" is half of your work day or week you
>> learn to be of use or
>> you lose your job, just like anyone else. You're
>> fired. You don't eat.
>
>This is real Maoist anti-intellectual rubbish. The
>work I do isn't real work. I;m not of use. Only hands
>on dirty, dangerous manual labor is real work.
>
I put "real work" in quotation marks for a reason. It is a colloquialism. It denotes rote and physical work. Obviously there is a lot of coordinator-type work that needs to be done, but there is also a lot of fluff and mummery that we could eliminate at no cost to our total productive capacity.
That aside, it's not "anti-intellectualism" to expect that a good economy would aspire to a more equitable division of labor, so that the empowering/pleasant/safe tasks are no longer monopolized by a small elite while the immiserating/shitty/dangerous tasks get dumped on the schlubs in the stockroom.
Furthermore, given my career track and what I do with my spare time, levelling the charge of "anti-intellectualism" at me is preposterous, and I don't appreciate the namecalling. I simply don't accept that intellectuals are a special breed who deserve special privileges. We have our uses, we are important, but we are not all-important.
>>
>> -You do not have the freedom not to scrub toilets,
>> as your fellow workers
>> expect you to do a fair share of the shitty work.
>> Ordinary workers, your
>> co-workers, in sufficient numbers, have authority
>> over you.
>>
>
>Yup, that's the real thing. Will they make me wear
>dunce caps and confess my anti-people attutudes too?
Ah ha ha.
>
>> -You seem to be implying that intellectual workers
>> are incapable of other
>> kinds of work. I think, however, that under the
>> circumstances I have
>> described, even my professors could learn to mop a
>> floor.
>
>
>Oh, yeah, I bet they could. I'm not sure it's worth
>talking to you about this,
As long as you limit your comments to name-calling, maoist-baiting and tilting at straw men, then no, it's not. If you want to show me why Parecon is unjust or unworkable, I am waiting.
>but I made the point that I
>do this sort of work already, ina ddition to my paid
>work, and I do it for free
I am sorry that this discussion is suddenly about your personal conduct, and it may be partly my fault that it has narrowed to that context, but i believe you brought it up first. If this unpaid work you refer to means keeping up your household/ caring for your family, then see above why i don't accept that it necessarily "counts" toward a balanced job complex (though a Parecon would probably have special programs to help support single moms and dads, as i've said). If on the other hand you are volunteering 6 hours per day at a soup kitchen or some such thing, then I congratulate you on your commitment to social justice and egalitarianism.
>because I have to, One
>might, however, wonder whether it is the best use of
>my time and skills to take me away from the work I was
>specially trained to do, and which not everyone could
>do. It's inefficient to have me type or clean toilets.
>You might insist on it to ram home the point that I'm
>not better than anyone else just because I have a law
>degree,
You are better in one important sense, which is to say, you are better at law. This training, however, does not give anyone the right to shift the burden of shitwork onto others. This presumes, as you have pointed out, that our hypothetical economy is willing to absorb the cost of "redundant" career training.
> but you better think through the efficiency
>costs of making people do work that they can do but
>are not necessarily best suited to do,
We have no idea as yet how many people can do or are well suited to do what sorts of work under good and humane conditions. One thing that is clear, however, is that markets waste human potential on a truly awe inspiring scale. This to me is monstrous and far outweighs my concerns about redundant job training.
>given what else
>they could be doing., I don't think you've done this.
>
Absolutely correct, I haven't done this at all. As I've said, I have no idea if Parecon would ever work, and the redundancy in training is certainly one of the biggest stumbling blocks I can think of to implementing a Pareconist system. On the other hand, as I've said before, there's a human cost to be balanced against the efficiency cost. If you want to discuss this further, we can.
If we were to discuss it further I would probably several general points: that enough resources exist to cover the extra training costs; that the efficiency gains that come with self-management would cover or even exceed the training costs; that even if we do get a net efficiency cost, which is by no means obvious, we may be willing to make that sacrifice in order to prevent the immiseration of rote workers.
One possibility I'm especially fond of: We could make the current two years of mandatory liberal arts training at the university level voluntary, reducing class sizes and funneling the newly freed resources into career training. Engineering students everywhere would rejoice. People might choose to spend 2-3 years at college rather than 4-5.
>>
>> -If their bodies are not equal to bailing hay,
>> weakened from decades of
>> physical inactivity, that's fine, we can give them
>> less strenuous work.
>> Scrubbing toilets, perhaps. Cooking. Cleaning.
>
>I am in fact in really excellent physical shape
No doubt! I don't know you, you're probably a wonderful person, very well rounded. Ok.
>My point
>i not that intellectuals or white color workers are
>too weak and feeble to build roads,
You said something about transported intellectuals having been of little use to the farmers, which i took to mean a lack of ability to do farm work.
If I misunderstood what you meant, ok.
>but that there are
>real cost to devoting considerable social resources to
>training people ins pecialized tasks, then making them
>work in nonspecialized taks for some considerable
>proportion of their time.
right. partially addressed above.
>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. She could do it, but you
>would have fewer and worse houses built.
Unless we take on the costs of training more people, which might yield greater benefits than costs, both in terms of total efficiency and in terms of the human cost of your kind of "efficency."
Chomsky likes to point out that "efficiency," as designed for example by capitalists and managers, tends to be a highly ideological concept. That's what I'm pushing here.
> Or if your
>thought is that she, unlike I, does real labor, you
>will have to expolain your Maoist prejudice in favor
>of manual labor, and why society should implement it
>as policy at great efficiency cost.
>
see above
>>
>>
>> Is 40 hours/week of dishwashing the best way to put
>> anyone's skills to use?
>
>Some people's,
In the case of some mentally disabled people, etc, but this is a tiny minority of the workforce.
>not as many as we have do it. But the
>solution isn't Maoist "offthe countryside!" with you,
no more maoism, please...
>but more generalized training and job opportunities in
>a context of greater use of automation designed to
>elininate or reduce backbreaking and tedious labor.
Right. We need more and better machines. We need to apply ourselves to reducing the total amount of shitwork, no doubt. for the foreseeable future, though, there's a whole lot of it to be done, and i don't think workers should be happy with a "we'll get to that later" attitude. Especially not if we were to see the rise of a new dominant managerial class, who would have no incentive to undermine their own authority and privilege by re-skilling rather than de-skilling labor. This would be like asking capitalists to get behind our movement to abolish private property.
>
>I will observe, though pointy-headed intellectuals
>like you might not believe it, that there are many
>people, millions on millions of them, and including
>(I'd add, most lawyers) would would prefer to wash
>dishes for 40 hoursa week than to do what I do, which
>is exacting legal research and writing -- much less
>what I do for _fun_, which is scholarly reserach in
>philosophy and political economics.
>
There is a large middle ground between nuclear physicist and dishwasher. Do you really think, that in all this middle ground, in an economy as large and complex as ours, that the average dishwahser couldn't find something suited to his innate talents and preferences that would both challenge his intellect and suit his tastes to a greater extent than 8-9 hours of mechanical, rote work in a hot kitchen next to a reeking garbage can full of soggy food scraps?
But, you might object, a significant number of people, even smart people, don't like to deal with complicated shit. They're intellectually lazy. Provided this is true, then we may be forced to recognize that there is a shit-work aspect to coordinator tasks: pressure to perform, intellectual exhaustion, burden of responsibility, whatever you wish to add. If this is true, which i can't take for granted just yet, then we have an additional reason to move toward BJCs, which is to say, Why should I have to worry day and night about how things are going down at the plant, deal with complex logistics, manage employee benefits etc, while all those lazy factory works drift around in a dreamlike intellectual stupor?
>
>> Presumably there is a tremendous human cost in such
>> divisions of labor.
>> Assuming Parecon entails an efficiency cost, which
>> isn't clear to me,
>> actually, this is a matter of balancing human cost
>> against efficiency cost,
>> and I think that as leftists we know which one we
>> ought to value more
>> highly, right?
>
>No. It's not obvious to me. But I'm a pretty poor
>leftist. I'm a fan of Hayek and Mises, and hard-headed
>about efficiency. I think it's easy to write off
>efficiency costs as not human, when you ignore the
>fact that inefficiency means waste, waste everybody's
>time, and translates into poverty. I have no patience
>with barracks socialism of the sort that you and A&H
>seem to admire.
woah! i think this is all addressed above in various places, not to mention the name calling is wearing a bit thin, so i'll just wrap this up here. One more comment: I find the idea of parecon attractive but i'm not very committed to it in any important sense, nor am i prepared to represent my tentative views as albert's or hahnel's. it's all wide open, there are trends, disagreements, differences of opinion, as with anything else.
And with that, my limit is maxed and homework awaits.