- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Hmmm...

Posted by: Red Deathy ( Socialist Party, UK ) on January 18, 19100 at 16:08:41:

In Reply to: 'Liberty in the workplace' versus job rotation posted by Barry Stoller on January 17, 19100 at 10:41:15:

:There's no way an assembly-line---or even a street-paving crew---can permit the anarchist 'ad hocary' of day-to-day individual liberty in the workplace. If a worker refuses to show up or to do such-and-such a task, production will be hampered, even stopped. That means commodities people expect on the communal store shelves will not be there.

But the alternative is to simply keep everyone as proletarianes, where the aim should be to abilish teh proletariate - we do not need compulsion to work.

: If one (even one) person wants to do only skilled work, then everyone else must take on the added unskilled work that the one shirker leaves undone... [In order to free people from having to do exclusively unskilled work, skilled work must not be appropriated exclusively.]

What if someone only wanted to do unskilled work? Must we stop them so as to share out the skilled jobs? What is a skilled job?

: It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that everyone will choose to play guitar and that no one will choose to maintain sewage (following a real life example from communitarian living at the East Wind intentional community, as reported by Kat Kinkcade in Is It Utopia Yet?): what if everyone wants to play guitar, leaving 'other jobs' to 'someone else'?

As I have said often on this board: "The conditions of failure is the reason for success", since socialism must be established by a willing majority, they'll have to be prepared to get teh work done in order to keep what they have founded for themselves.


Finally, who ever said that workers would be exchanging their production? Surely the basis of socialism is the abolition of exchange? You can't exchange what you allready own.


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