[lbo-talk] William Morris & Craft (was All Praise to George F. Babbit or something like that

[Carrol Cox]

I don't know Morris's work very well. But so far as I do know it it
would seem to be one essential part of a socialist conception of human
activity. And I would guess (though we are getting into recipes here)
that under socialist condtions (as perhaps under the conditions of
paleolithic hunting/gathering cultures) a larger proportion of men and
women _would_ be capable of developing such skills and thereby
tranhsforming work into (what we have no other word for) play. What I
don't know is how much of the total necessary labor can be restructured
as craft and hence play. (Incidentally, I am using "labor" here in the
sense Arendt gives it in _The Human Condition_  rather than in the
technical Marxian sense. In the latter sense its speedy and total
abolition is _the_ essence of socialism.) But aside from considerations
of life under socialism there is the immediate question of the struggle
for socialism in the present. The struggle for the 32 (and eventually
24) hour week are obvious parts of any serious left movement. But there
needs to be found ways of also incorporating a struggle for mor
_porous_, laess laborious, worktime, along with a repudiation of
workers' personal responsibility for incrasing the rate of surplus
value!

Carrol

P.S. I don't know what to do except gasp in astonishment of seeing the
mucular Christianity of "self-improvement" advanced as a left concern.
> 
> Carrol, There is an alternative formulation for thinking through these
> problems, most notably expressed by William Morris, but a similar strain
> of thought can be found in Bloch and others, which tries to radically
> reimagine the laboring process by deinstrumentalizing it.  Morris'
> expresses this through the concept of craft, but you can see a similar
> approach in the Bauhaus approach to craft and art as well.  Perhaps to put
> it crudely, it entails a rejection of the separation of intellectual and
> physical labor.  I'd be curious to your thoughts on that.  Is it falling
> into the Rousseau trap?  Inpractical? etc.  I'm not sure on this question,
> which should be obvious by the somewhat crude formulation, so I would like
> to hear your thoughts or others.... robert wood
> 
> > "The dignity of Labor" was an important core for the Rousseauan rather
> > than Marxists struggles of the last 2000 years. But the Indignity of
> > labor, The Right to Laziness, must be the slogans of the struggle for
> > freedom.
> >
> > Labor -- any laboar at all -- is slavery. It must be reduced to an
> > absolute minimium, approaching zero. This is not in the least utopian or
> > unrnealistic. In paleolithic culture no labor or work existec because
> > what came to be isolated as labor was simply intermixed with the rhythms
> > of daily life. There was no visible or theoretical division between work
> > and play.
> >
> > Tha tis our goal, and we have to embody it in our shorterm reform
> > slogans as well as in our understandibng of our ultiamte goals.
> >
> > Carrol