Everyone has chores.
>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.
>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 knew, but they learned a lot
>themselves.
-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.
-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.
-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.
-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.
>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?
Is 40 hours/week of dishwashing the best way to put anyone's skills to use?
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?
>ANyway, the main point is that there will be plenty of
>room for lawyers, bureaucrtas, economists, and other
>malign times in parecon or any nonmarket system. jks
>
>jks
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.