Your point? That the work I do for six hours a day after working for 10 or 12 as a lawyer doesn't count?
>
> >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.
>
>
>
> -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.
>
> -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?
> -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, 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 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, 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, given what else they could be doing., I don't think you've done this.
>
> -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, apart from a knee I threw out yesterday when I discovered forward lunges with 50 pound dumbbells are five pounds too heavy even for a stone ironhead like me. My point i not that intellectuals or white color workers are too weak and feeble to build roads, 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.
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. 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.
>
>
> Is 40 hours/week of dishwashing the best way to put
> anyone's skills to use?
Some people's, not as many as we have do it. But the solution isn't Maoist "offthe countryside!" with you, but more generalized training and job opportunities in a context of greater use of automation designed to elininate or reduce backbreaking and tedious labor.
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.
> 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. I think we can vastly improve the lives of those on the bottom without degrading the lives of those on the top, "a levelling down to a preconceived minimum," as old Whiskers put it.
> > No, Parecon, ideally, gets rid of "lawyer" as a
job
> description. You spend
> half your time, I don't know, proofreading
> contracts, and half your time
> scrubbing out toilets or something.
I'd certainly rather scrub out toilets than proofread contracts. But if your parecon werethe only choice, I'd stick with what we have.
jks
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