> What are empowering tasks? What distinguishes them from
> those which aren't?
The lists are both nearly endless...so the issue is to think of the attributes.
For example, when we created South End Press some decades ago...we realized that if some people typeset all day, or clean up all day, or answer phones all day, or pack and send books all day - while others edit and work withauthors, or managing the budget and financial decisions, or design books and promotion, etc. -- then one set of people would have entirely deadening, rote, obedient, tasks -- while the other set had tasks which gave them an overarching picture of the operation, relations to daily decision making, ties to information and assets that were critically important, and so on.
It is the difference between about 18% I call coordinator class members in the U.S. now, and about 80% I call the working class. With roughly, for this purpose of discussion, 2% capitalists.
If we remove capitalists by having social or state ownership of productive assets, for example -- we may or may not still have that class division. IF we do -- as in what has been called centrally planned socialism and market socialism -- then the roughly 18% are the new ruling class -- I call the systems coordinatorism. If we eliminate the class division, as in parecon, then we have something quite different -- and I think far more desirable.
Thus, broadly speaking, it is the difference between those who have considerable to great contorl over their own work and impact on the conditions and work of those below -- and who are highly remunerated and enjoy high status and power -- largely based on credentials enforced by a monopoly on skills, knowedge, and positions in the division of labor as well as prior training -- and those who do essentially obedient work, lacking contol even over even their own circumstnaces, lacking credentials, empowering tasks, etc.
In the former group -- high level lawyers, doctors, professors, managers, engineers, artists, athletes, architects, performers, and so on and so forth...
In the latter group -- the working class...rest.
Are there muddy layers in between -- sure. Folks with aspects of both, aspiring to be in the former or identifying with the latter and possibly vaciliating at different times.
The relevance to economic vision is simply to we eliminate this class hierarchy, or do we enforce it, in a new non-capitalist economy.