DS writes:
"But what if I, an individual living in a socialist society, have no subjective
interest or desire in performing janitorial services?"
1. You're positing a "me" vs "society" model which you have been programmed to
take for reality as a result of living in a culture that does not see the connection between the
individual good and the common good.
2. You're assuming that manual labor is ipso facto bad and to be shunned, again
as the result of programming that makes invidious comparisons between mental
and manual work.
"Maybe there will be a happy coincidence that there will be people who "want" to perform such services,
so I will not "have" to do my share. But what if there is not such a happy coincidence? Could I be
"required" to do something in a socialist society?"
With respect to the sort of consciousness that a socialist society might inspire, you are acting kind of like a child or adolescent who doesn't want to eat his spinach, brush his teeth, etc.
" How would that mechanism work, and why would not that mechanism be philosophically
incompatible with the experiential status of freedom as opposed to necessity?"
You're hardly likely to be "free" living in mountains of garbage. Your freedom
might also be affected by the unfreedom of illness that results from living in garbage.
In short, you mistake freedom for license and do not see that freedom and
necessity are intertwined. You must satisfy your hunger in order to act freely.
You also mistake the deeper meaning of freedom if you imagine that you can
obtain it at the cost of another's unfreedom.
A friend of my parents, a nuclear physicist, once recalled the day, after the
second world war, when she was allowed to return to the physics institute in
Romania and to work. The institute had been bombed and even the sections of it
that were usable were full of dirt and debris. She began her work in physics,
by washing the floor. She told me it was the happiest day of her life.
You cannot understand socialism or how to build it so long as you do not
recognize the extent to which all your notions of humanity and freedom have
been shaped under capitalism. It requires more than intelligence to see this;
it requires imagination and an actual and deep interest in something more than
your personality.
Joanna
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