Hi Jenny
On Wed, 29 Jan 2003 01:39:29 Jenny Brown (: JBrown72073 at cs.com ) said
Quoting JKS
>>Btw, I like the relentless negative picture of everyone in this "class": apparantly all teachers do is to produce obedient drones, all managers to is to police workers,all engineers do is to deskill labor. In the Brave New World, when all of thgese people have been re-educated and put to proper work as hewers of wood and drawerrs of water,
Quoting Steve MCGraw's reply
> 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?
>Because work is being defined primarily as a negative, as are some advances n productive techniques (i.e. industrialization). In Albert & Hahnel's conception, you almost have to define work negatively in general so it makes sense to spend so much time developing judgement calls about what work is pleasant and what work isn't to develop the job clusters or whatever they call them. My main objection to Albert & Hahnel is that they take what is fairly simple and make a mind-bogglingly complex bureaucratic nightmare. What's wrong with washing toilets for 4 months (at say 20 hours/week) and then going to school for 2 years, farming for the harvest season, and then spending three years working as a road engineer? That shares the shit work, too. Or in Edward Bellamy's conception, shorten the hours for unpopular
jobs, in effect increasing the pay, until you can fill them. There's your market, Justin. But in a situation with no involuntary unemployment, the market is in jobs, not labor.
Sorry - but the bean counting hss to do with an industrial economy - not a Parecon specific requirement Let's take the simplest case. Renumeration is not tied to work. You have Bill Barletts equal guaranteed incomes for everyone Lie on the beach, paint picures, build computers - whatever you choose. So all the work is done by people who want it done showing up voluntarily - like soup kitchens, and some emergency stuff now.
Now Bill Bartlett painted a picture of how toilets get cleaned in his society. Leave the cleaning supplies next to the shared workplace or public toilet, someone will clean it. Uh-huh. That someone will be whoever has the least tolerance for filth, or who has the cleaning habit most strongly imbedded. Given the way men and women are currently soicalized what gender do you think that person will be most of the time?
Now the thing about fighting fires, or planting food, or cleaing toilets is that the need is pretty damn obvious. if that was all there was to be done it could be done by people just spontaneously volunteering. No bean counting required. But there is stuff that does not point itself out so obviously. For example you have trasnportation - cars or trains or bicyles or probably all three plus trains, boats, ships and submarines and ... OK that may be obvious too. But the question the comes, how much of each? Do the existing factories have the capaicity we need or de we need more? Are the existing facotries fundamentally inhumane in the way they are set up? Do we meed to modify them physically or can social rearrangement alone make them fit places to work? How much maintenace should we give them? Are there some factories we should keep but not maintaining - using them while they last, but replacing them as soon as they wear out with better ones?
OK and then there is the work in these factories (and every where else of course). And there is the problem of the task list. Everything that has to be done in a factory is not self-evident. One or more of the volunteers has figure out a complete list of what has to be done. And the same or other volunteers have to maintain that list, as tasks change. And that is not the end of it. Some tasks have to be done before others. Some tasks have to be goruped together, and done by people in the same part of the factory. The vast majority have to be done on certain equipment - some of them on equipment used for other tasks. So the sharing of that equipment has to be scheduled. And some tasks really almost have to be done by the same people who do other tasks. So defining jobs is also part of the what the volunteers have to do.
The bean counting required for balanced job complexes is trivial compared to the bean counting required for an industrial society. This applies in any of the examples we have discussed. Market socialism , Parecon, Bellamy's setup, Bartlett's proposal, capitalism.
>Also parecon (at least in the book--I haven't followed the web stuff) has some issues with paid work / unpaid work. The point Justin makes about chores is a good one (and feminist). Why is taking care of your kid paid but taking care of my own kid isn't? Obviously, because I won't show up to take care of your kid unless you pay me. But if the guiding principle is to split up work equitably, there's no sense in counting this work out.
You are right that it should count somehow. But Justin was trying to balance against his paid work while not considering that other people do the same chores while not sharing in the paid work. Counting it is fine. Using it as an excuse for not counting paid work is not.
I'm going to drop the Bartlett assumption for a moment, because in moving chores into the paid sphere you are too. If eveyone has equal income regardless of work then obviously no-one will be paid for houswork anymore than any other work.
I'm going to go a bit further into this. I know at least some feminists (including one on this list) who thinks the idea of wages for houswork and childcare is absurd. Yes the chores should be shared equally between men and women. But they think some other way can be found to make sure they are shared equally. But I think the idea that as long as work is renumerated that currently unpaid, but absolutely vital work should be done here.
Only I see some more bean counting here. Suppose you and I earn exactly the same income in work outside our homes. I live in a tiny apartment I can clean in a half hour, and use the money I save to travel. Travel is not recreation for you; you choose to live in a big sprawling house that takes a couple of hours a day to clean? Should you earn more money than I do because you prefer additional housing to other ways you spend your money? On the other hand if you are not paid for the additional cleaning are subsidizing my travel.
Even so, I'm certainly not ruling it out. I don't believe what I mentioned above is insoluable - but your proposal will require some sort of bean counting. I really do hope there is another method that will produce the same results. Because I think it is really good that there are some things that are not measured by money. I think even JKS will agree as a market socialist that it is better if what does not need for practical reason to be decided by the market is left to other human spheres. But if that is really the only way to achieve gender equity, or if all the other ways that would work are worse, then that is a neccisity and it should be done.
Something else that might be worth considering. Suppose we agree that in a society bent on wipeing out patriarchy, something damn serious will have to be done to compensate for all the lingering patriarchal institutions and attitudes we have to fight. Well here is one proposal. Instead of paying everyone equal pay for equal work (or equal income regardless of work in Bartlett's formulation) why not pay woman (and other socially constructed oppressed groups) more for the same income (or in Bartletts formulation a slightly higher income, not tied to work than everyone else). For that matter, in democratic voting why not give oppressed groups votes that are weighted slightly higher? Not forever. You would set a time limit of say 100 years. Presumably women and people of color and the disabled and the queer would use this extra power to wipe out the social oppression, so when it expired these oppression were gone. I don't know if I'm serious or not. I am sure that if a society seriously intends to eliminate these types of opressions in addition to class opression, somehting this drastic will need to be done. Because while I believe that if we ever win socialism, these oppression will have benn weakened as neccesary pre-condition, I don't believe they will be gone or even nearly gone.
>But I'm with billbartlett if we gotta be doing all this parecon beancounting and parallel coercion why the hell not just institute a guaranteed annual
OK I think I pretty well have domolished the bean counting argument. In terms of coercion that is one extensive additional argument. Leave Parecon aside for a moment. In a just society, if someone wants to, do you think they should be able to idle on the beach all and let the more socially concious volunteer to do the work? Do you think someone should be able to lie on the couch all day and let someone else do the housework? "After all , you are doing all this vaccuming voluntarily m'dear. It is not my fault you are more bothered by a little dust than I am." I have some gender assumptions about who is lying on the couch speaking, and who is vaccuming the carpet in the above example, In how many cases out of ten do you think my assumption is wrong?
I can make a much longer argument. But what the hell. JKS is the Hayek fan here. Why don't I wait and see if he will voluntarily perform this onerous task, without coercion...
income.
Jenny Brown