[lbo-talk] Cuba's painful blah blah

[jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net]

> joanna wrote:
> 
>  It can
> be a washing machine, which saves women the labor of washing clothes;
> or it can be an assembly line which breaks a task into a million
> meaningless tasks requiring no skill and creating an army of bored,
> depressed, stressed workers whose mental and physical life is degraded
> every day by having to do such work. 
> the sweaters I knit last about ten times longer than those I can get commercially. The buildings 
> we're building today will NOT be around a hundred years from now. I guarantee it. Mostly 
> because we're building cheap, and fast, with very unskilled labor. Most medieval cathedrals, 
> however, are still standing one thousand years later.
> 

 

 There are all sorts of things very wrong with this.

 

 An assembly line is a perfect image of the absolute neutrality of

 technology as such. This simplification of labor would be the basis of

 human freedom in a world in which hours of labor were short, and

 conditions of work were under the control of the workers.

 

 And the washing machine creates the illusion that laundry is a sensible

 _solitary_ task, instead of a task which should be wholly socialized.

 The misery of laundry by hand was, like that of assembly line work, an

 illusion created by the social conditions under which they occurred. In

 a sensible social order there would be no individual washing machines

 but there would be assembly lines.

 

 Given the productivity of medieval agriculture, just imagine how many

 peasants starved or died of sheer fatigue to feed the men who built

 those cathedrals. The Pyramids are still standing too. Big deal.

 

 Carrol

How do you come to the idea that cleaning my boxer shorts should be a community affair instead of my 
own? If a "sensible society" requires me to haul my laundry to another location in order to clean it you can 
count me and tens of millions of others out thanks. Certainly a sensible society will need assembly lines but 
calling them "a perfect image of the absolute neutrality of technology" is stretching things a bit I think. 

Do you think a sensible society would also rid the world of private auto ownership? Private cooking 
arrangements? Private TV/Radio?Recorded music entertainment? Private dwellings? How is cooking 
for/with my family different than washing the families laundry?

What evidence do you have that peasants died in significant numbers from exhaustion or starvation 
because of increased pressure during the building of catherdals or castles? Not that I think for one minute a 
return to medieval building practices is desirable or rewarding but I've never read anything that would lead 
me to such a conclusion. Certainly a higher construction accident rate and much less focus on safety would 
result in more deaths than would be acceptable today but you can find that under capitalism as well. The 
Panama Canal wasted at least 25,000 lives. That would not be acceptable today but that difference doesn't 
depend on  any difference between capitalism and feudalism.

John Thornton