Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 00:38:40 -0500 (EST) From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us> Subject: M-TH: Planning Redux Carroll raises an issue about socialism that's tangental to the planning questions were talking about, but which is important. I guess in the spirit of Marx I'd want to say that reduction of _necesasry_ labor time is an important goal, but nonetheless I personally go with Marx on work be the realization of freedom, not necesasry labor, but work that's freely undertaken because people find it gratifying. When I'm writing a piece of philosophy I work 120 hour weeks and I would not appreciate being dragged away from my books and told that I had to enjoy myself in some other way. Not everyone has work that they feel this way about, more's the pity. But them as do should not be prohibited indulging themselves. It's a real puzzle why the struggle for the shortening of the working day came to a stop with the 8 hour day. ANd of course lately, especially in America, the pressure is in the reverse direction. This is a real problem in law, where people are expected to put in ridiculous hours despite its being demonstrable that outside of short bursts od a few weeks, extended hours just extend the five or so hours of a day one can actually get out of people over more hours. My parochial concerns aside, though, why is it that we don't have a 35 hour a week movement? From talking to people, granted these days I mainly talk to law students, but this was also true when I was talking more to workers, it seems taht people think that of they do less work they are somehow cheating and certainly shouldn't get as much remuneration. Do you suppose that if the labor movement took up the slogan or there was some other effective laedership pressing it--I don't mean a tiny "party" of three or five hundred people--that it would actch on? I find this puzzling. The raeson I mention it is that CArroll sats that a democratic society would make the choice for drastically curtianed work week. I wonder if that's true, at least as things stand, Obviousa society that had socialist democarcy would have undergone some changes. But why think, apart from the notion that work is wretched, that it would? After all, under socialism, we can hope that even necesasry labor would be a lot less wretched, I want to propose another one: an absolute limit > of work time, no greater than a 20 hour week for anyone. Such a limitation > would seem to me of far greater importance than any conceivable > innovation, including (to make my point clear) elimination of cancer or > other such highly desirable bit of progress. Rather than argue abstractly > for this "proposal" I would prefer to predict than any revolutionary > struggle which is internally democratic will make this choice, Carroll bites the bullet on my argument that socialism would be counter-innovative across the board. It would, and he thinks that's a good thing. Maybe it is. I don't know. But I do want to insist that this means a major departure from Marx; among other things it means abadinding the "fettering" account of the tarnsituion to socialism. We can no longer say, if Carroll and I are right about this, that the objective undrerlying explanation for the instability of capitalism and the transition to socialism is that capitalism fetters productive forces tahtw ould be unleashed if capitalist social relations were abolished. and that > socialism will very definitely, at least for many generations, severely > limit desirable as well as undesirable "innovations." I do not see that as > particularly undesirable. Capitalist "progress" has given the whole earth > and the human species a bellyache, and we need much time to digest it. --jks --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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