Steve says he's a creeping democrat and not a Maoist, but I think his endorsement of what he says is the parecon proposal that intellectuals and white color workers be forced to do menial manual labor is equivalent to the Maoist idea of sending the intellectuals to the countryside. What Steve saysd here does not dissuade me from that, or even begin to persuade me that parecon has a sensible way of dealing with fair distribution of unpleasant necessary labor.
By the way, Gar, I resent your seer at my profession, as if good lawyering were a matter of sleazy and misleading rhetorical appeals. Good lawyering is about producing good arguments. I knwo that yoiu and Sreve don't think you want to send the intellectuals to the countryside, but I hope to make it clear that if you advocate the proposal as described here, that is what you would be doing.
My own proposal for this is truly democratic: let the workers who (in a decent socialist society) manage production decide. That avoids the evils and insanity of micromanaging the organization of production a priori, and allows for experimentation. Although I advocate modeling alternatives to capiatlism, the parecpn job sharing proposal highlights thes ort of arrogant
I would like to see menial necessary jobs be better remunerated than they are, although I don't think this could be mandated effectively by law because of the wide diveregence, on which I have remarked, about what jobs people find unpleasant. I doubt that in a socialist society we would see the sort of income inequalities we have under American capitalism. Even under capitalism worker self-managed coops have pretty flat pay structures.
A few interlinear comments follow.
jks >Your point? That the work I do for six hours a day
>after working for 10 or 12 as a lawyer doesn't count?
>
s: That your household chores and family duties have little to do with BJCs or
the economy.
One would hop that feminist consciousness were further advanced. So women's work has little do s=do with the economy! Joanna, Kelly, no response?
jks: 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.
S: 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.
You've misunderstood. The cultural revolution was intended to make such permanent changes.
S: I put "real work" in quotation marks for a reason. It is a colloquialism. It denotes rote and physical work.
Speaks for itseld, a classic Maoist valoraztion of physical labor as the only "real work.
S: 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.
A lot of manual menial work too!
S: 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.
What's anti-intellectual is the statement that only manual work is real work. Of course I subscribe to the goal sketched here. I just disagree desperately with your conception of how to realize it. You take the nature of the jobs as given, project your own values and interests on everyone, and then call for forced redistribution of sojme of the schlumphy jobs to the privileged elite, put them in their place.
S: Furthermore, given my career track and what I do with my spare time, levelling the charge of "anti-intellectualism" at me is preposterous,
Au contraire. Intellectuals make the best anti-intellectuals.At the risk of blowing your gaskets completely, and bearing in mind that I do not accuse you of supporting mass murder, the Pol Pot regime, created by Paris-educated intellectuals, was the apotheosis of this.
S. > 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.
So who said they were?
S. 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.
Actually I think we have a pretty good idea. Look at how poorly most people do _with every advantage_. The fact is, most folks are only as bright and hardworking as average, and the average is none too high.
S: 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.
Let's not go there. I'm really quite fierce in my support otf markets, but discussion on thsi seem to be fruitless.
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.
I meant taht they lacked the intellectual and practical knowledge of how to harm. You assume,w ith a typical intellectual's arrogance, that farming is mostly stupid, backbreaking, monotonous labor.
Dinner calls, I gota go eat it and then clean up, though that doesn't count socially, at leasta ccording to some folks.
jks
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