snit snat wrote:
>
>
> I always wonder about the DoL thing in thinking about what a socialist
> future might look like. While I agree that the details must be worked out
> as move in that directions--nodding to Carrol's "cookshops of the future,"
> it still seems that there is such a disagreement among those of us on the
> left on this particular issue, that it's hard to imagine any easy answers.
If you contextualize a bit it becomes a less daunting problem. A few observations.
1. Whether or not the division of labor is going to be abolished _eventually_ or not, it is certainly not going to be abolished during the first generation or two of a socialist world. (And it is certainly not going to be abolished in any socialist nations in a still predominantly capitalist world.)
2. One can take it for granted that the capitalist conditions immediately (10+ years at a minimum) before a socialist victory (by whatever means) would be _radically_ different from present conditions. We cannot now even imagine usefully _which_ sectors of the working class (assuming it to constitute some 90% of the population) would have carried out the inauguration of a socialist regime, which would have been passive, and which would have been in the camp of the enemy. (Don't even assume that we know how evangelicals would respond under quite different conditioons.) Hence all the first few decades of the socialist period would have to achieve was to make life _slightly_ better for whichever sections of the working class provided it with its political base.
2a. Surely capitalism is not going to eliminate terrible housing for a minimum of 1/3 of the population, and probably an increasing proportion. (Under improving conditions the change would probably be more violent than under deteriorating conditions.) Hence very possible a decent diet, improved housing and transportation, and shorter hours would more (to begin with) compensate for any other deteriorations under socialism.
3. If it is democratic socialism we are talking about, then a minimum of 1/3, perhaps more, of the population would have become actively involved in political life, and there would be a rich political and social context during the first three or four decades of the new regime in which to debate out priorities within a context in which movement towards those priorities would coincide with establishing them as such. (Though I believe that in the long run market socialism would be impractical, we can take it for granted during the first decades of socialism, only gradually snipped away at.)
4. Actually, the coming to political power of the working class would almost certainly coincide with huge social disruptions, vicious repression, great suffering within capitalism, and the preceding suggestions probably overestimate how much _immediate_ improvement a socialist regime would have to provide.
Carrol