[lbo-talk] To each according to work

[andie nachgeborenen]

I don't pretend that there are easy decisions, but it's not the quality of the literature that is at stake but the nature of the activity. A teacher of literature may be pulling his weight by reading Horace or indeed John Grishma. A goofoff may be goofing off, as I have been way too much lately, by reading Moby-Dick. What's important is that we should understand that there will not be a stable society based on recipricity and solidarity unless there is a general feeling that most people are pulling their weight as best they can. My point is not that we should be in the biz of trying to draft compensation and balancing rules for a future societry, one of the many points wherethe Parecon crowd goes wrong, but that it's dumb not to recognize that a system that doesn't require, and in fact in soime sense measure. contribution, on a roughly quantitative comparative scale, is going to be rife with opportunities for exploitation and indeed will be unstable as

 those exploited by others they feel to be goofoofs benefitingf at their expense slack off on necesswary labor. This claim embodies some unpleasant but true assumptions about human nature than we may transcend someday, but we deal with the new society as it emerges from the womb of the old, c'est ne pas? I know I will be damned as a captive of the old Puritan Protestant Jewish worj ethic, someone who doesn't realize that policing (I use the word deliberately) contribution is a bad part of bourgeouis society that will be transcended in a better world, that there will be few slackers because enough people will just love to do the dirty and dangerous work while othersenjoy themselves, and that assigning tasks among workers will be a matter of autonomnous agreement ratherthan labor management. Hooey. 

--- On Fri, 4/18/08, W. Kiernan <wkiernan at gmail.com> wrote:


> From: W. Kiernan <wkiernan at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] To each according to work
> To: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com, lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, April 18, 2008, 9:45 PM
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>  >
>  > But if someone wants to sit on the beach
>  > and read John Grisham while I take out the
>  > garbage and clean up after dinner
> 
> What if he wants to read Horace or Gogol or somebody
> respectable like that?
> 
> yrs wdk

WBtw, who says Gogol is respectable? Antisemitic pig, defender of the pogromchiki.

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