This is a PS note on the last post and for andie nachgeborenen. And it addresses a point that was implied above and was more obvious in another thread (barbaric, Productivity, Efficiency, Enron, Doom), where AN said he was deeply suspicious of a privilaging of heavy industry, manufacturing and other material aspects of an economy. What he was implying perhaps was I sounded somewhat Stalinist or old school commie. Chuck0 would call it it Statist. I try to answer a little of that too. While both of those points might be true, I also have another reason and whole non-theoretical agenda.
Since I've worked in blue collar jobs most of my life, I have met a lot of blue collar people, Duh. And I've tried to see how they came to be the way they are---so as to understand myself in many respects. Many of these people, including me, like to work with their hands, with things, doing `something real'. They like to see stuff get build that they can see, touch, admire, and come years later still see. I am like that too. We share that. And there is another factor at work here. Many, many people don't like school work. They didn't like it as kids and they didn't like it when they had jobs doing something like it. I don't particularly like working on a computer, filing, sorting through folders, looking up numbers, dates, names, and the other paraphernalia that probably composes the vast majority of white collar jobs. I can do it, and do it pretty well, once I get a system down. But I don't like it. I decided I didn't like pissing around in Ilustrator, cutting and pasting, deleting little points in vector graphics, blah, blah, blah. I liked drawing with just about anything else but the mouse.
Now, when I look out over the vast urban landscape I deliver equipment to, I see a whole dying working class ethic, mind set, culture, and its people, and they are very much like me---minus my few and rather thin privileges. The way I see it, the way to help rise this class up is to build a society with its political economy that creates the material means to do just that. And that is why in my theoretical musings, I privilege industry, manufacturing, construction, transport, distribution and other so-called brick and mortar stuff. The way to get a well skilled, well paid, and healthy mass of people is to make the means of production of the economy directly available to them through jobs that they can do, right now, as they are. Get dressed for work, pack your lunch, get on the bus, and get to work.
We (they) don't need a bunch of education crap with tests and badges. We need well run plants, construction projects, warehouse, shipping, transport and communication systems with jobs people can do or quickly learn to do on the job. That's how I learned most of my blue collar skills. I got my union card and stood in line. When I got a job ticket, I went to the construction site and saw the foreman. He put me under a good journeyman, and I went to work nailing concrete forms. The journeyman's name was Walt and he knew how to organize my work, so I learned while I was working. He planned out our day in a few minutes in the morning while we had coffee and off we went. Almost everyday I learned something new and could muse on it in the evening, mainly because I was too exhausted to do anything else. Buildings have layers upon layers of knowledge and craft that are learned by reproducing them as work. While buildings are designed by architectural firms (plus massive bribes to city hall), all of that has to be translated into material reality---and the way that is done is by people who know how to do that---even down to ignorant slobs like me with a hammer. It only takes a few weeks to learn how to use a hammer. That a hammer takes some practice to use, is probably deep knowledge to a lot of the white collar crew... and it absolutely can not be learned in a book. There are no three hundred dollar night classes in hammer technology. If there are, don't sign up.
So then when I think about the most `efficient' and most `productive' way to re-develop the US political economy, I think about it in terms of how to raise the working class and lower middle class up from the ground---to change their material conditions. Why factories and construction, or transport, energy, or distribution facilities? Well because that's were all things in our lives are made or come from and that's were and how our material life is constituted as a society. Job experience in these places builds on and transforms the whole cultural knowledge base as a working class phenomenon, or if you will develops working class conscieousness.
And mostly because under suitable control, planning, and political management, that's were most jobs that fit most people who need good jobs are. Sure managing a securities portfolio is real work, but are there say tens of thousands of jobs in your city doing that? On the other hand, when I look out on the material infrastructure of the SF Bay Area, I can see thousands and thousands of jobs that desperately need to be done soon or sooner---by the same people I see struggling hard and losing most of the time, disillusioned, and just getting by or not.
On yet another thread answering a different question, Chuck0 writes:
``Anarchists have always pointed out, correctly, that the details of cooperative enterprises should be determined by those who are involved in such projects.''
While I complete agree with this idea, the problem that I see is there are very few people left in the working class who know how to organize, plan or manage the kinds of systems that I think are needed. Maybe at one time when the massive material infrastructure of the country was booming, there were plenty of these people around. But now, after almost a half century of neglect or abuse or dismantling, not even the upper reaches of the hierarchy has the kind of knowledge and experience needed to run these kinds of projects.
CG